City of Golden Shadow (44 page)

"I have some image enhancement gear that might help," she said. "Some of the preliminary stages can work through while we have lunch-clean up the signal noise, rewind the de-resolution sequence as much as possible. Come along. Jeremiah's probably having a fit."

"!Xabbu?" Renie put her hand on his shoulder. The Bushman seemed entranced by the wallscreen image. "Are you okay?"

"This way, even distorted so, it still seems familiar to me." He stared at the shapeless swirls of amber, gold, and creamy yellow. "I have seen this somewhere, but it is not a memory so much as a feeling."

Renie shrugged. "I don't know what to say. Let's go have lunch. Maybe it will come to you."

He followed her almost reluctantly, stopping one last time in the elevator doorway to look back, his brow wrinkled in perplexity.

Susan had been right: Jeremiah was more than a little offended when the doctor and her guests trooped in twenty minutes late for lunch. "I did not poach the fish until I heard you coming," he said accusingly. "But I cannot promise anything about the vegetables."

In fact, the vegetables had survived very nicely, and the sea-bass was tender and flaky. Renie could not remember when she had eaten such a nice meal, and she took pains to tell Dako so.

His good humor slightly restored, the man nodded as he cleared the dishes. "Doctor Van Bleeck would rather have sandwiches every day," he said, an art dealer asked for paintings on black velvet.

Susan laughed. "I just never want to have to come upstairs and sit down when I'm working. The days when I don't work through lunch and sometimes dinner are the days I'm feeling my age. You don't want me to be old, do you, Jeremiah?"

"The doctor is not old," he said. "The doctor is stubborn and self-centered." He withdrew to the kitchen.

"Poor man." Susan shook her head. "He came to work for us when my husband was still alive. We used to have parties then, people from the university, foreign visitors. It was a more fulfilling household to run, I'm sure. But he's right-he doesn't see me most days after breakfast, unless there's some correspondence I have to sign. He leaves bitter little notes about all the things he's done that I haven't noticed. They make me laugh, I'm afraid."

!Xabbu had been watching Jeremiah with careful interest "He is like my mother's brother, I think-a proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit"

Susan pursed her lips. Renie thought the doctor might be offended. "Perhaps you are right," she said at last "I have not set Jeremiah many challenges lately-I have rather drawn in on myself. But maybe that has been selfish of me." She turned to Renie. "He came to us at a time when things were still very unsettled, of course. He had been very poorly educated-you do not know how lucky you are, Irene. The school system was already much better by the time you came along. But I think Jeremiah would have done well in any number of things, given the opportunity. He is an extremely quick learner and very thorough." The doctor looked down at her hands, at the silver spoon held in her gnarled fingers. "I had hoped his generation would be the last to grow up damaged by what we did."

Renie could not help thinking of her own father, floundering in an ocean invisible to everyone else, unable to find solid ground on which to stand.

"I'll think about what you said, !Xabbu." Susan put down her fork and briskly wiped her hands. "It is possible to get too set in one's ways. Anyway, let's go see what we can do with our mystery city."

The imaging programs had restored the snapshot to something like a recognizable picture. The substance of the city was now visible as a garden of fuzzy vertical oblongs and triangles, with impressionist smears representing the roads and elevated rails. Renie and the doctor began to correct small areas, adding detail from their own memory that augmented the general patterns imposed by the enhancement gear. !Xabbu proved particularly helpful. His visual memory was excellent: where Renie and Susan might remember that there had been windows in the flat plane of a wall, !Xabbu could often tell them how many there had been and which had been illuminated.

After more than an hour a picture had taken shape that was recognizably the golden city which had burned on the screen for a few brief moments. It was less sharply defined, and there were areas in which the reconstruction was largely guesswork, but anyone who had seen such a place would recognize this as an image of it.

"So now we start searching." Susan tilted her head to one side. "Although it's still not quite right, somehow."

"It doesn't look real any more," said Renie. "It's lost that alive quality. Of course it has-it's a flat, unmoving, totally rebuilt version. But that was part of the effect of the original. It was like looking through a hole in the computer at a real city."

"I suppose you're right. Still, it's the strangest damn place I've ever seen. If it's real, it must be one of those prefab fibramic monstrosities they string up overnight in the Indonesian Archipelago or somewhere like that." She rubbed at her knees. "These damn sensors are starting to chafe my legs. I'm afraid I'm going to have to call it a day, my dear. But I'll start searching for a good match off the specialist nets-you're not back at work yet, are you? Then you might as well let me do it. I've got at least three contracts I could charge it off to-multinationals with million human-hour datacomb projects who'd never notice a little extra connection time. And I've got a friend-well, an acquaintance-named Martine Desroubins, who's an absolutely top-flight researcher. I'll see if she has anything to offer. Maybe Martine will even pitch in a little free help, since it's for a good cause." She looked at Renie, that shrewd, searching gaze again. "It is for a good cause, isn't it? This is something very important to you,"

Renie could only nod.

"Right, then. On your way. I'll call you if I get any hits."

Dako met them outside the elevator on the main floor. As if by magic, he had the car waiting at the front door.

Renie hugged Doctor Van Bleeck and pressed a kiss against her powdered cheek. "Thank you. It's been wonderful to see you."

Susan smiled. "You didn't have to wait until you were being chased by VR terrorists to come visit me, you know."

"I know. Thank you so much."

!Xabbu shook the doctor's hand. She held on to him for a few moments, her eyes bright "It's been a pleasure to meet you. I hope you will come again."

"I would like that very much."

"Good. It's settled." She rolled her chair onto the porch as they climbed into the car, then waved to them from the shadows of the porch as Dako swung around the long driveway and out onto the tree-lined road.

"You look very sad." !Xabbu had been staring at her for a long uncomfortable time.

"Not sad. Just . . . frustrated. Every time I think I might be getting somewhere with this, I run into a brick wall."

"You should not say 'I,' but 'we.' "

His liquid brown eyes rebuked her, but Renie could not even find the strength to feel guilty. "You've helped me a lot, !Xabbu. Of course you have."

"I am not speaking of me, but of you. You are not alone-look, today we have spoken to that wise woman, your friend, and she will certainly help us. There is strength in companionship, in family." !Xabbu spread his hands. "We are all of us small when set against the great powers, against the thunder or the sandstorm."

"This is more than a sandstorm." Renie fumbled reflexively for a cigarette, then remembered she couldn't smoke on the bus. "If I'm not completely crazy, this is bigger and stranger than anything I've ever heard of."

"But that is just the time when you must call on those who will help you. In my family, we say 'I wish baboons were on this rock.' Except that we call them 'the people who sit on their heels.' "

"Call who?"

"The baboons. I was taught that all the creatures who live beneath the sun are people-like us, but different. It is not a familiar way to think among city-folk, I know, but to my family, especially my father's family, all living things are people. The baboons are the people that sit on their heels. Surely you have seen them and know it is so."

Renie nodded, a little ashamed that she had only seen baboons caged in the Durban Zoo. "But why did you say you wished there were baboons on a rock?"

"It means that it is a time of great necessity and we need help. Usually, my people and the people who sit on their heels were not friends. In fact, long ago the baboons committed a great crime against our Grandfather Mantis. There was a great war between his people and theirs."

Renie could not help smiling. He spoke of these mythical beings, monkeys and mantises, as casually as if they were fellow students at the Poly. "A war?"

"Yes. It came of a long argument. Mantis was fearful that things would turn sour, so to be prepared he sent one of his sons to gather sticks to make arrows. The baboons saw this boy carefully choosing and gathering the wood and asked him what he was doing." !Xabbu shook his head. "Young Mantis was foolishly innocent. He told them that his father was preparing to make war against the people who sat on their heels. The baboons were enraged and fearful. They became more and more agitated, arguing among themselves, then at last they fell upon Young Mantis and killed him. Then, made bold by their easy victory, they took his eye and played with it, throwing it back and forth between them as though it were a ball, crying 'I want it! Whose turn is it?' over and over again as they fought for it.

"Old Grandfather Mantis heard his son crying out to him in a dream. He took his bow and ran so fast to the place that even the few arrows he carried rattled like wind in a thorn bush. He fought the baboons, and though he was far outnumbered, he managed to take from them his son's eye although he was badly wounded himself. He put it in his skin bag and fled.

"He took the eye to a place where water rose from the ground and reeds grew, and he put the eye in the water, telling it to grow once more. Many days he returned to find nothing had changed, but still he did not stop. Then one day he heard splashing, and found his child made whole again, swimming in the water." !Xabbu grinned, enjoying the happy moment, then his expression sobered. "That was the first battle in the war between the baboons and the Mantis people. It was a long and terrible fight, and both sides suffered many losses before it ended."

"But I don't understand. If that's the story, why would you say you want baboons to help you? They sound terrible."

"Ah, but they were only that way because they were frightened, thinking that Grandfather Mantis intended to make war on them. But the real reason we ask the baboons to help is an old story of my father's family. I fear I am talking too much, though." He looked at her from beneath his eyelashes with, Renie thought, a certain sly humor.

"No, please," she said. Anything was preferable to dwelling on her own failures as the bleak gray city rolled past the windows. "Tell me."

"It happened long ago-so long that I'm sure you would believe it to be a myth." He gave her a look that was mockingly stern. "I was told that the woman involved was my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother.

"In any case, a woman of my family whose name was N!uka became separated from her people. There had been a drought, and all the people had to go in different directions, all to search the farthest sipping holes. She and her husband went one direction, he carrying their last water in an ostrich egg, she carrying their young child upon her hip.

"They walked far but did not find water at the first or the second hole they tried. They moved on, but had to stop because of the darkness. Thirsty and hungry as well-for during a drought, of course, game is hard to find-they lay down to sleep. N!uka cradled her child close, singing so that he might forget the pains in his stomach.

"She awoke. The slivered moon, which inspired men of the Early Race to make the first bow, was high overhead, but it gave little light. Her husband sat upright beside her, his eyes wide and frightened. A voice spoke from the darkness beyond the last smoldering coals of their fire. They could see nothing but two eyes gleaming like cold, distant stars.

" 'I see three of you, two large, one small,' the voice said. 'Give me the small one, for I am hungry, and I will let the other two go.'

"N!uka held her child close. 'Who is that?' she cried. 'Who is there?' But the voice only repeated what it said before.

" 'We will not do that,' her husband cried. 'And if you come near to our fire, I will shoot you with a poisoned arrow and your blood will turn sour in your veins and you will die.'

" 'Then I would be foolish to come to your fire,' the voice said. 'But I am patient You are far from your people, and you must sleep sometime. . . ."

"The eyes winked out. N!uka and her husband were very frightened. 'I know who that is,' she said. 'That is Hyena, the worst of the Old Ones. He will follow us until we fall asleep, then he will kill us and devour our child.'

" "Then I will fight him now, before weariness and thirst take all my strength away,' said her husband. 'But it may be my day to die, for Hyena is clever and his jaws are strong. I will go out to fight him, but you must run away with our child,' N!uka argued with him, but he would not change his mind. He sang a song to the Morning Star, the greatest of all hunters, then went out into the darkness. N!uka wept as she carried their child away. She heard a coughing bark-chuff, chuff, chuff!-" !Xabbu jutted his chin forward to make the noise, "and then her husband cried out. After that, she heard nothing. She ran and ran, urging her child to be silent. After a while, she heard a voice calling from behind her, 'I see two of you, one large and one small. Give me the small one, for I am hungry, and I will let the other one go.' She had a great fear then, for she knew that Old Hyena had killed her husband, and that soon he would catch her as well and kill both her and her child, and there were none of her people anywhere close that could help her. She was alone in that night."

!Xabbu's voice had taken on a strange cadence, as though the original tale in its original words struggled to make itself heard through the unfamiliar English tongue. Renie, who had been wondering a little uncomfortably whether her friend actually believed the story was true, suddenly had a kind of revelation. It was a story, no more, no less, and stories were the tilings people used to give the universe a shape. In that, she realized, !Xabbu was exactly right: there was little difference between a folktale, a religious revelation, and a scientific theory. It was an unsettling and oddly liberating concept, and for a moment she lost the track of !Xabbu's tale.