Palace (15 page)

As if it had lost patience, waiting for him to enter location coordinates, the Gate began to move, slowly at first, swinging back and forth in a lazy arc, then a little faster, back and forth, around and around like a pendulum. Rico, still choking, felt his stomach turn over and threaten to empty. He gasped for words.

‘Stabilize.’

Nothing happened. If his body threw up, lying on its back, he could be in real trouble. ‘Oh no! By God’s Eye!’

The Gate stopped swinging, then began to move straight up, faster and faster, rushing upward into blackness like a lift booth gone mad. Rico could barely think, much less try commands, as it careened into the Interstice, a black-seeming comscation that buffered the Map construct from the end-user station interfaces. It was only another illusion, the blackness, but as he gasped for breath and shivered, wrapped in the freezing membrane, Rico found it real enough. He could not see, could not hear. What had Arno told him - he couldn’t remember - he’d been a real
dim,
a dead chip, to think he knew enough to use the Gate. All at once Rico heard a sound like beeping clocks. The Gate burst out of the blackness into pale blue and stopped, floating. Rico looked down on what seemed to be Palace itself, the whole planet turning under him but stripped of its cloud cover. He looked up and saw Tableau, glittering with ice, hanging a seeming few feet away, and Souk, too, pale green and a couple of yards beyond. Trailing off in a long spiral hung all the worlds of the Pinch, or rather, their Maps, including a dead-black cinder of a sphere that had to be Kephalon. He was hanging in the Hypermap. He was seeing the entire Pinch.

Rico turned slowly round, smiling, staring, almost laughing, looking at this panoply of worlds that dangled in a pale sky without stars. Somehow he’d never realized that it would be so beautiful, the Hypermap, that it would seem so
whole,
so elegant. All he’d ever known before was the Map of Palace, a thing as cluttered, swarming, patched, and tattered as the city-state it represented. But out here, for instance, hung the Nimue Archipelago, a sphere defined by blueglass moons. In the physical world, they orbited Palace’s star beyond the orbit of its farthest planet, but here they constellated a perfect form. As he studied the planetary Maps, Rico noticed faint lines of golden light that webbed each world round. Each planetary web sent out tendrils that touched and knotted between the worlds, and from each knot grew more golden lines, fusing the webs into one vast whole. Rico had seen diagrams of these webs in school material, the hyperwave carriers for messages, the crucial lines of communication that kept Pinch civilization functioning. They followed the pattern of the interstellar microshunts; indeed, this construct of lines had been the original ‘map’, a simple analogue of the microshunts for navigation purposes. All of these elaborate worlds and their cross-connections had come later, laboriously built by the first cybermasters of the Pinch. Rico wanted to stay there for hours, staring at the splendid sights of the Map, but always he remembered Arno. He looked down and concentrated on Palace. ‘Magnify.’

The Gate dropped - that was how he felt it - dropped down and suddenly. His skin seemed so cold that Rico felt he might shatter, his body as brittle as ice, but all at once the Gate stopped, floating over the planet, which now filled his entire view. He was at the analogue of an orbit suitable for a communications satellite, he figured. Below him he could see the vast swamps of the northern continent, Nox, a thing of temporary islands and drowned lands, taken by the sea only some fifteen hundred years ago.

‘Show Palace city.’

A voice sounded, thin and electric.

‘Error correction.’

‘The city of Palace.’

‘Error correction.’

Damn you, he thought.

‘Throw ambiguity switch. Find: correction terminology for the city-state that occupies the coast of the continent known as Lux.’

A moment’s pause, then the voice. ‘Polis. The city.’

The lightning cold seemed to play down his spine. You knew that, kind of, Rico told himself. You read about it in ancient history class. How old was the Gate, then? Had it been made by the Colonizers? And why hadn’t Uncle Hi or some other member of the clan found and solved this terminology glitch already? No time now to wonder.

‘Enter permanent term amplification. Polis equals Palace.’

‘Done.’

‘Show Palace.’

This time the Gate stayed steady while the Map turned beneath him, then stopped. The view below centred round the famous twin towers of blueglass in the midst of Government House. From this high vantage, Rico could clearly see that the towers formed the central points of an enormous ellipse, marked out by the dot pattern of fusion power nodes as well as by hundreds of Mappoints, the blueglass structures that functioned as work stations for those who knew how to use them. Over this basic pattern ran and tangled thousands of developments, or devs, marked out as lines of so dark a blue they were almost black. They lay like lace over another kind of map, that of Palace’s streets and buildings, drawn and stippled in red and maroon.

‘Show Tech Sect.’

‘Error correction.’

Damn! Some words in Gen it understood perfectly; others only glitched its databanks. Since Arno had been working with the Gate, he must have amplified - added additional meanings to some of its commands but not others, or so Rico could suppose, anyway. Probably Arno had entered standard guild metas to save time and memory.

‘Arco daz dev.’

In answer, the Gate swooped down. Rico felt the membrane of cold tighten, digging into his skin like a thousand needles, as the Gate turned and swung like a meteor close over the surface of the Map. At first, scattered Mappoints whipped by, dots of blue, and isolated devs snaked under him. As they flew round toward Palace, the points and the devs increased, clustered, tangled together into a massive snarl over Government House and the twin towers, only to loosen somewhat as they slid past Centre Sect and glided, more slowly now, over Tech.

Without the close packed dwells and warehouses, without the webwork of canals and barges, and the thousands of small shops and other structures that had no analogue on the Map, Tech Sect sprawled thin as a skeleton. What remained were a welter of low-level accesses and perhaps two dozen blueglass Mappoints, the most heavily guarded structures in the Pinch. Rico had no intention of meddling with them. The Gate might be able to get him undetected onto the Map, but getting anyone past the array of sensors and security devices that protected the perimeters of those Mappoints lay far beyond its function level.

‘Arco trez dev.’

The Gate hesitated, then dropped a little lower, fastening on to the development line and gliding along it like a highway. On this level of citizen access stations, Rico saw plenty of light pulses that meant a robotic grab tool, bringing information about shopping or banking to someone’s home screen. He also saw iconic bodies shaped like humans and Hirrel - the Maprunners, whom ordinary citizens could hire to do more complicated jobs for them. A lot of Cyberguild members never progressed beyond the runner level. Every now and then Rico saw an icon marked by a Lep crest, but the crest only meant, under the new post-war dispensation, that some human Maprunner had taken a job for a Lep who needed business done.

The Arco trez dev led Rico and the Gate into the heart of one of the strangest areas on the Palace Map, a place of shanties and shacks in the real world and their equivalent on the Map. Over the past thousands of years various sapients had built these Mappoints out of cannibalized blueglass and odd bits of equipment, then linked them up to a section of the Map that had been badly damaged at the closing of the macroshunt, when a neutrino shock wave had swept over through the Pinch, blowing out the nearer AIs and damaging most of the distant ones. Though Palace had suffered less than most worlds, even so here and there lay areas like this one, where isolated functions and utilities still worked or agents still ran, but in such a broken form that they were of no use to the real masters of the Map. Every now and then, though, one of these fly-by-night operations made good, against all odds, only to find themselves stuck with their Map location now that all their customers and suppliers knew it. It was a good place to hide a message drop, and Arno and Rico had built theirs by adding a bit of Mapspace onto one of those recently legitimate enterprises, Pansect Media, where no-one would ever check dimensions. In return, like good guests, they’d built the company a scrubber submeta to improve its transmission quality. As the Gate ran to the end of the meta and slid into the message drop, which they’d visualized as a hut, Rico felt a change in his body’s simulated interface. Although the lightning had stopped crackling along his skin, he felt even colder than before, as if half-frozen he stood in a freezing wind. Inside the dim walls, vaguely marked to resemble wood planks, lines of scintillating colour shot back and forth, the secured narrowband transmissions of the Pansect operation. These Rico and Arno had always left strictly alone. They had a band and niche of their own.

‘Furious green,’ Rico said.

On the floor an illusion of planks vanished, revealing another illusion, a metal trap door. In the air around him icons of jadewings appeared, all safely green - red would have meant someone had been tampering with their cache. Rico knelt down, but he hesitated before he opened the panel. He’d been checking it regularly ever since Arno’s disappearance only to find nothing. What made him think there would be something now? He remembered Arno’s voice, shaky but urgent, telling him a submeta, and the way he’d reached out a shaking hand to meld jacks. It wasn’t just some accident, meeting him there in the festival. Rico opened the panel, swung his feet over the edge, and climbed downstairs. Waiting at the bottom lay a cave, an image from a holovid they’d both loved as boys. Grim grey stone walls lowered round a pool of water, and greenish stalactites gleamed with phosphorescence. From a ledge they’d hung shields, painted with clan devices, and representations of something called laser guns - symbols from the primitive tribes in the holovid, who had taken to the caves to defend their sacred places from evil Lep invaders. Just how the guns were supposed to work in a culture that lit their rooms with fire was one of the holovid’s many lapses, but no matter -they’d loved the story anyway.

Inside the pool lay a sealed box. Rico pulled it out, sat down cross-legged, and lifted the lid with trembling hands to find a rev-chip, a frozen figurine of a jadewing. Rico picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand, but thanks to the wrap of ice the Gate had placed round him, he could barely feel it. He was aware, though, that the cold had deepened. All at once it occurred to him to wonder just how long you could use the Gate safely.

‘Time is running out.’

Although Rico said the words, he felt as if some other sapient had somehow placed them into his mouth. They seemed to come from the inside out, as if the Gate had borrowed his consciousness to make them heard. He’d had other experiences like this on the Map, when it seemed as if the Map itself was whispering to him. Arno had always teased him about it, too, but now Rico could consider Uncle Hi, saying that dead Nimue had once tried to reach him. It was real enough, then. Time was running out. He held up the figurine.

‘Open and run.’

The revchip melted in Rico’s palm and turned to a glowing green puddle, leaking between his fingers to the cavern floor. He flung the last of it down and jumped to his feet as the liquid swelled and grew like a tree-trunk, a shaft of green that first turned grey, then shaped itself into a saccule, but one with a human smile. When it spoke, even its voice sounded nothing like Arno.

‘Greetings, user,’ the rev said. ‘If you’re who I think you are, you can tell me who the ice cube with eyes is.’

‘Pukosu.’ Rico laughed - they’d called her that a hundred times. The saccule revenant rippled, then solidified. When it grinned, it wore Arno’s smile, and the voice had changed, too, into his cousin’s. Yet its eyes became empty holes through which Rico could see faint sparks of colour.

‘I have to make this quick, pal, so you’ll have to figure out some of this stuff yourself later. But let me tell you something right now.’ The revenant leaned forward with its hands propped on either thigh, a gesture that only Arno could have programmed in. ‘I never abused drugs. When I saw you at the Pleasure Sect this morning, it broke my heart. I don’t care what the Man says, you deserve to know that I didn’t turn into a head and leave you behind just for the fun of it.’

‘The Man? Do you mean Hi?’

The revenant froze briefly. So, Arno hadn’t had time to program in an interact function. Damn!

‘This rev,’ it went on, ‘is nil-heuristic and self-erasing, so listen close. I’ve been undercover for months. I can’t tell you why, but don’t worry, the Man will tell you everything when he gets back from where you saw me last. Here’s what you need to know. There’s a girl coming out of Pleasure Sect. She’s got hair the colour of that rev we found on your birthday.’

It took Rico a moment to remember the peculiar russet-red cow they’d found that day, wandering the Map on its own, someone’s idea of a joke.

‘Can’t risk telling you her name, but you’ll know her when you see her. She’s very important. The Man and some other people will be watching her, but I want you to keep an eye on her, too. I have a feeling about her, pal. Someone’s trying to kill her. Keep her safe, okay? Last thing. Big thing. I gave you an all-meta when I saw you. Remember?’

Rico had to grin at that - as if he would have forgotten.

‘Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to, but if you’re in trouble, don’t hesitate. It’s a fine thing, pal, and I wish I could be there to see your face when you run it. You’re going to be amazed.

‘Anyway, I’ve got to go. Chances are, you won’t be seeing or hearing from me again for a very long time. Whoever’s trying to kill the girl is trying to kill me, too. You know me, though, I can be pretty quick when I have to. Keep the faith, pal. Be careful. Keep your eyes open. Test the limits. And don’t let the Man run your life. The Map moves, buddy.’