Mountain of Black Glass (10 page)

It quickly became clear—and here for the first time T4b spoke expansively if, as always, somewhat opaquely—that he was a natural. (“Major hammerhead netboy,” was how he described himself.) His grandparents began to feel that maybe their gamble was going to pay off. Things were not really that simple, of course—one of the main attractions of the net was that he could still run with his old Goggleboy crowd, even if only virtually—but it was true that young Javier had begun to feel a freedom and a sense of possibility he hadn't known before. “Magic big,” he called the experience, providing a bit of poetry. But as he went on to explain, it was only when his friend Matti succumbed to a mysterious illness that he had made the net his full-time crusade.

“I have never heard of anyone your age being affected by the Grail Brotherhood's online virus, or whatever it is,” said Florimel. “The illness that has taken my Eirene.”

“So?” T4b glowered. “Calling me duppy?” His unchanging mask of Kabuki-warrior ferocity and his spiky, formfitting armor made it hard to think of him as someone named Javier, but it was not difficult to sense the insecure street kid underneath it all.

In fact,
thought Renie,
that's what they all wear anyway. Whether they're on my street in Pinetown or wherever it is he comes from—“So-Phee ”—most of them are so armored up that they can barely move. But here in VR you can actually see it.

“No,” Florimel told him calmly, “I am not calling you anything.” Finally telling her own story seemed to have taken some of the edge off her approach; she sounded, Renie thought, almost human. “I'm just trying to get information which may be important to all of us. How old was this Matti when it happened?”

T4b stared at her, then abruptly turned away, going from frightening robot to spike-studded child in moments. Renie wondered whether they were asking for the right person's age.

“Please answer. It might help us, T4b,” said Martine. “We are all here for the same reasons, or at least we are all in the same danger.”

T4b mumbled something.

“What?” Renie resisted the urge to shake him, mostly because there were few spots on him that were safe to touch. She had never been good with people playing hard-to-get. “We can't hear you.”

T4b spoke in a gust of anger and shame. “Nine. He nine. But wasn't nothing weird—not like that William. No babybouncer, me.”

“William said he meant and did nothing wrong,” Martine said, her voice so soothing Renie found herself nodding like a comic bystander. “I believed him. And I believe you, too.”

Renie thought she saw Florimel mouth the words,
Speak for yourself,
but she was distracted by T4b's reaction.

“Don't understand nothin', you.” He grabbed a handful of the not-earth and crushed it into translucent powder in his servo-motored fist. “Matti, he was crash—he knew all stuff nobody here know. All over the net, he going here, going there. For a micro, he was outmax. Whatever got him had to be far far dire. So got all matrixed and went lookin' for it, me.” He proceeded to describe a search across the net that seemed to have taken him months, culminating in the discovery of one of Sellars' golden gems near a tribute wall in a VR park frequented by the youngest Goggleboys, like Matti.

Renie was wondering whether Javier Rogers' grandparents were rich, and if not, how he could afford to stay online so long; she was also growing curious as to who was taking care of T4b's physical body right now. Suddenly Emily spoke up with a question that Renie herself had occasionally been tempted to ask.

“So,” the young woman asked, her tone half-contemptuous but ever so slightly flirty as well—a change, because she had been treating T4b like the plague since he had arrived—“what are you supposed to
be,
anyway? Some kind of spaceman?”

Florimel hid a snort of laughter, but poorly.

“Spaceman?” asked T4b in high dudgeon. It was an old-fashioned word, and he repeated it as though she had asked him whether he was a farmer or a janitor. “Not no
sayee-lo
spaceman. This a Manstroid D-9 Screamer Battlesuit, like outta
Boyz Go 2 Hell
!” He looked around, but no one responded.
“Boyz Go 2 Hell
?” he tried again. “Like with the Ballbuster Bugs and the Scorchmarkers . . .”

“If it's an interactive game,” Renie said, “you've got the wrong crowd, I'm afraid. If Orlando and Fredericks were here, I'm sure they'd recognize it.”

“Don't even know Manstroid Screamer . . .” he muttered, shaking his great metal head.

“I have a question, too,” !Xabbu piped up. “Is that mask the only face you have in this place, or is there another underneath?”

T4b stared at him in stunned silence. “Underneath . . . ?”

“Underneath the mask,” Florimel said. “Have you even tried to take it off?”

He had swiveled to face her now, but did not react to what she said, only stared as though in a dream. At last, slowly, his spike-gauntleted hands crept up to the flared sides of the battle-mask, sliding up and down the polished edges until one of his fingers slid into a slot below one of the finny protuberances. He found the corresponding slot, then pressed them both. A loud click was followed by the front of the mask swinging up out of the way like a medieval knight's face shield.

The face that peered out from beneath was simply that of a brown-skinned teenager with long black hair and startled eyes. Even the runic Goggleboy designs picked out on his cheeks, neck, and forehead in faintly luminous subdermals could not disguise how ordinarily homely and normal a face it was. Renie did not doubt that she was seeing a very convincing simulation of the true Javier Rogers.

Only a few seconds passed before T4b flinched beneath the weight of their collected gazes and clicked the mask back into place.

 

T
HE fire had burned down. They had talked and talked until they had fallen into a surreal timelessness unusual even for this place.

“. . . So this is what it all comes down to,” Renie said at last. “Do we try to explore this place and find a way out? Or do we search for the lighter that . . . I want to say Quan Li, but it wasn't Quan Li, of course. Do we search for that lighter instead, which could bring us some control over our environment?

“How we gonna hunt something like that?” T4b asked. Like Florimel, he seemed to have lost a little of his abrasiveness after confession. Even his rigorously unintelligible Goggleboy patois had shifted a little closer to normal speech. “Need one to find one.”

“We may not.” Renie turned to !Xabbu. “That's why I gave it to you to open a gateway for that monster—hoping that if you did it, it would make some impression on you. Do you think there's any way you could find that gateway again? By . . . dancing, or by doing anything at all?”

!Xabbu looked worried, an oddly natural expression for a furrowed baboon brow. “I found it difficult even when I had the lighter in my hand, Renie. And as I have told you, the dancing, the searching for answers, is not like ordering something in the mail. It is not a foolproof delivery system.”

“Nothing is foolproof for us these days.” She couldn't even smile.

“Perhaps I could help.” Martine spoke slowly. “I have learned things myself since I have been in this place, and since !Xabbu and I . . . connected through the access device, I suppose you could say. Perhaps together we could find that gateway again and open it.” She turned her blind eyes to Renie. “I think it would be a great gamble, but if you are all in a gambling mood, there are few enough opportunities left to us.”

“Let's vote on it.” Seeing the faces of her companions, Renie relented. “If you're not too tired, that is. I suppose we could wait until tomorrow.”

“Could we not wait in any case?” Martine asked. “I mean, would it not be good to explore this unusual part of the network first, no matter what?”

“But if we wait, we give that bastard a greater chance to escape,” Renie pointed out. “Not to mention the fact that you and !Xabbu may lose whatever insight you have—you may just forget, like trying to remember some stranger's name three days after they tell it to you.”

“I am not certain that is a good analogy,” said Martine, “but there is perhaps something in what you say.”

“Very well, then, Renie,” Florimel said, amused and disgusted. “We will have no peace until we give you your vote. I assume I know what you and !Xabbu will say. For me, I say we stay here until we know more about this place.”

“But . . .” Renie began.

“Is it not enough we are voting?” Florimel asked. “Do you need to harangue those who disagree with you?”

Renie frowned. “You're right. I'm sorry. Let's go on.”

“I want to vote, too,” said Emily suddenly. “I know I'm not one of your friends, but I don't have anywhere else to go, and I want to vote.” She said it as though it were a treat.

Renie was uncomfortable with the idea of putting someone who might not even be fully real on an equal footing with the rest of them. “But, Emily, you don't know all the things we know—you haven't been through everything . . .”

“Don't be mean!” the girl said. “I heard everything you've said since we've been here, and I'm not stupid.”

“Let her,” rumbled T4b, recovering from the embarrassment of showing his naked face. “Prejudiced, you, somethin'?”

Renie sighed. She didn't even want to begin discussing the ins and outs of Emily's possible status, since it would have to be done in front of the girl herself. “What do the rest of you think about Emily voting?”

Florimel and Martine nodded slowly. “You remember what I have said, Renie,” !Xabbu reminded her quietly.

Which is that he thinks she's real,
Renie thought.
Which should carry some weight, after all—he hasn't often been wrong about anything.
“All right, then,” she said aloud. “What do you think we should do, Emily?”

“Get out of here,” the girl said promptly. “I hate this place. It's not right. And there's nothing to eat.”

Renie could not help but notice that she had been resisting a vote in her own favor, but was still not entirely comfortable about its source. “Okay. Who else?”

“I'm afraid I agree with Florimel, instead,” said Martine. “I need rest—we have come through a very frightening time.”

“We all have!” Renie caught herself. “Sorry. I'm out of line again.”

“That was my thought, too,” Florimel told Martine. “I don't want to go anywhere yet—if nothing else, I need to build up some strength. Remember that you were here for a day before we got here, Renie. Perhaps after the rest of us have had a chance to recover, and to get to know this place somewhat . . .”

“So we come down to you, T4b.” Renie turned to the spiky, fire-glinting shape. “What will it be?”

“
Fen
—that dup tried to six us! Say we catch her, me, and vile her up good.” T4b curled a mailed fist. “Don't let her get away, what it means.”

“I'm not at all sure it's a ‘her,' ” Renie said, but inside she was pleased: that made it four to two to follow the spy—and, more importantly, Azador's lighter. “So that's it, then.”

“No.” !Xabbu raised one small hand. “I have not made my vote yet. Florimel said she assumed I would vote as you did, Renie. But I do not.”

“You . . . you don't?” She felt nearly as astonished as if he instead of Quan Li had turned out to be a murderous stranger.

“When I look at our friends, I see that they are very tired, and I would like to see them rested before we run to danger again. But more importantly, Renie, whatever hid behind Quan Li's face, it frightens me.”

“Of course it does,” Renie said. “Don't you think I'm frightened, too?”

!Xabbu shook his head. “That is not what I mean. I . . . felt something, saw something. I do not have the words. But it was as though for a moment I felt the breath of Hyena, out of the old tales—or worse. There is a deep, hungry darkness in that one, whatever it is. I do not wish to rush toward it. Not yet, anyway, not until I can think about what I saw, what I felt. I vote we wait.”

Renie was more than a little stunned. “So . . . so that makes it three to three. . . . What do we do, then?” She blinked. “Is that the same as if I were outvoted? That doesn't seem fair.”

“Let us say instead that we will take the vote again soon.” Martine patted Renie's hand. “Perhaps we will feel differently after we have had another night's sleep.”

“Night?” Florimel laughed flatly. “You ask for too much, Martine. But just sleep will be enough.”

Martine's smile was sad. “Of course, Florimel. I forget sometimes that for others it is not always night.”