Pathfinder (33 page)

“Who are they all?” Mara gasps.

They come in cyberwaves, one after the other, on and on and on—life-size lumenbeings that move, talk, sing, and shout right in the middle of Fox's room. He has the lights down low to let them see the figures more clearly, and each glows with a ghostly aura. They are so real that Mara can see sweat gleaming on one face, emotion in the eyes of another.

“They're twentieth-century icons,” says Fox. “A ghost parade from the last century. For years I've collected them from derelict sites and dustbins in the back alleys of the Weave and hidden them away. And now I'm bringing them all back from the dead.”

Mara sinks back in her chair and lets the twentieth-century wave wash over her. The tide of faces and voices is hypnotic. Shakily, she reminds herself that they're not real, only lumens.

“Wow, who's she? Can you slow this thing down?”

Fox reverses the images, stopping on a blond woman. “This one?”

Mara nods, entranced by the woman, who is so beautiful she seems to be made from the stuff of dreams. She
captivates the watcher with a seductive charisma of eyes and mouth and movement.

Fox calls up a biography and it scrolls at the woman's feet. “
Marilyn Monroe, film star. Death by suspected suicide at the height of her fame
.”

They reel through more. Tens of faces reel into hundreds. Mara begins to feel dizzy.

“I think I've had enough—no, wait a minute. Who's that?”

But Fox has already stopped on the solitary figure of a young man in a spotlight. A guitar is slung over his shoulder and a slick lock of black hair falls across a shy, sullen face. A beautiful face. He looks uncertain, endearing. Silently, he raises his arm with the intensity of a coiled spring. Now he's dangerous, utterly magnetic. What is it that's so compelling about him? Mara wonders, as she stares open-mouthed at the life-sized lumen just a step in front of her. Then she knows what it is.

Electricity; he's full of it—he could explode.

And then he does. Mara jumps in her seat as his hand hits the guitar and he lets rip in a song. A ghostly frenzy of screaming teenagers fills the room, almost drowning out the raw, hungry voice. Now he's like a tiger; lean, savage, and graceful, prowling an invisible cage.

“What was
that
?” Mara gasps as the explosion of human energy ends.

Fox grins. “That was rock 'n' roll.”

“
Who
was that?”

“That was Elvis.” Fox doesn't need to read the biography on this one; he knows it by heart. “Elvis Presley, the king of rock 'n' roll, singing ‘Hound Dog,' the song that shook up the world.”

“Shook
me
up,” Mara grins back. Her heart is racing. “He self-destructed too,” she notes, scanning the biography text.

“Watch this one.” Fox is calling up something else from his lumen ghost bank. “He led the world into an abyss before he self-destructed.”

Mara finds herself staring into the most terrifying eyes she has ever seen. They lock with her own and seem to bore through her skull with a mesmeric, overpowering presence.

“Stop it!” she tells Fox. “I don't like this one.”

“It's only a lumen.” Fox puts his arm around her. “You must see this.”

The man stands alone in a spotlight. His hair is black, and the fierce, ugly white face is slashed by a slab of black mustache. Somehow Mara knows that he is utterly dangerous.

He raises his arm in silence—then explodes into frenzy. He barks out words with a ferocity that makes him foam at the mouth like a rabid dog. He's a ridiculous spectacle, repulsive and undignified… and yet Mara cannot look away. The noise of a vast, invisible crowd rises like a tidal wave around him.

It's uncanny. Mara is spellbound by words she cannot even understand, hypnotized by the wild-dog eyes. The man's passion infects her—it's a savage possession of spirit; a chaotic sensation disturbingly close to the way she felt watching Elvis.

Except the essence of one is joy, the other hate. One is fueled by the energy of life, the other by death. Somehow, she is sure of that.

“Who is he?”

“Hitler,” says Fox. “Leader of the German Nazi party.
Responsible for the deaths and suffering of millions in the Second World War.”

“One man did all that?” Mara's heart is pounding. She feels nauseous and upset.

“Well, one man sparked all that. He couldn't have done it if lots of others hadn't followed his dream, could he?” Fox looks at Mara meaningfully. “You can't change the fate of the world all on your own.”

“I don't see the point of all this, Fox.”

But he's not listening. He stops on the echo of a voice and backtracks.

“
I have a dream!
” shouts a voice.

A young black man appears.

“
I have a dream!
” he shouts again. The emotion in his voice is so intense, there's an unsettling, almost musical tremor to his words. Mara yearns to know the dream that consumes him. It excites her even though she doesn't know what it is. Then he tells his dream.

“
To be free at last! Free at last! Free at last!
”

It sounds like a shout from the future—yet it's an echo from the past.

“This is the one!” cries Fox. “Martin Luther King.”

He reads out the short biography. “Human rights activist who fought for a fair and equal world. Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Assassinated at the height of his influence.”

A better world—so that was his dream, thinks Mara. And he died for that dream.

“
And if a man has nothing to die for
,” cries the strong, tremulous voice, “
then his life is worth nothing
.”

Mara is magnetized. The words cut to her core.

The image judders, fades, and Martin Luther King is replaced by a huge and vicious lump of metal—a lumen
missile that looks terrifyingly solid and real. Mara screams and dives for cover behind her chair as it cruises toward her, slowly, with deadly precision. A handspan from her face it switches direction. There's the deep, rising moan of a siren, a sound so petrifying it stuns the moment. Mara grips the chair as she seems to fall sharply out of the present to land with a jolt in some alien, bomb-blasted street. In the heart of the devastated street appear the figures of four mop-headed youths. “
Help!
” they sing urgently, over and over, as the missile weaves menace around their heads and the siren-moan dies and rises, dies and rises. There's a loud
crump
and the street fills with smoke and dust.

Mara watches open-mouthed as two more figures briefly materialize. A pigtailed girl in glittering red shoes and a bespectacled boy with a lightning zigzag on his brow race across the street. “
Which way
—
which way to the wizard?
” the girl in red shoes cries, as they fade into ghosts.

“Something wrong here,” mutters Fox. He bangs his godgem with his fist. “Sometimes images get jumbled and they overlap.”

Mara is struggling to read the muddled text reel.

BEATLES HELP! CRUISE MISSILE ATTACK

Fox ducks as the missile zips toward his head, then he stands up, embarrassed, and mutters into his godbox. The images collapse and vanish and the room feels strange, as if reality has gone flat. Mara stares at the emptiness, then turns to Fox.

“
Well?
What on Earth was that all about?”

“It's about the past,” Fox declares. “It's about infecting the present with the past and—with luck—changing the future.”

Fox jumps up and prowls the room, his eyes fixed on some vivid vision that Mara can't see.

“I'm going to create a virus,” he announces. “A ghost virus so powerful it will crash New Mungo out of the Noos, disable all the functions of the city—doors, lights, electrics, security, the lot. Then you can escape.”

A window of time, that's all she'll have. And when that window slams shut, her chance to escape will be gone. But the virus will hit like a tidal wave, Fox promises.

For the last few days they have burrowed away in Fox's apartment, working out their plan, grabbing snatches of sleep whenever exhaustion grounds them to a halt. Now he explains how it will work, using a handful of colored glass pebbles from some kind of board game that sits on the floor. He scatters the pebbles all over the floor.

“Imagine these pebbles are godgems all over the Noos, all over the Earth. I pick any old godgem, a random selection from all around the world.” He grabs one at random, then another and another. “Then I put a germ in the machine, a ghost germ. Now that godgem becomes a zombie—it contains one of my living-dead lumens. The godgem still works as normal but it's a carrier for my ghost virus. The rooks are always on antivirus Noos raids, but the beauty of this one is it's almost impossible to spot—because it takes the form of a ghost. I program all the zombie godgems to pass on the virus every time they connect with another godgem. The ghost virus spreads fast, but nobody knows it's there. Not yet. I'll give it time
to spread far and wide, into godgems all around the Noos. In just hours it'll infect thousands, in a day it could have infected a million. Then…”

Fox grins. “Then I turn the ghosts live and call them all back home. In they'll come, crashing downline—and hit the city in a colossal tidal wave!”

They stare into each other's eyes. Mara really hasn't a clue what he's going on about but she believes in him now; she trusts him with her life. If anyone can tackle the incredible technology of the New World, it's Fox.

“Cyberflood,” he whispers. “Total systems wipeout. Once the system is crashed, the security systems are all down too. That breakdown is your chance to find the slaves and get them out of the city and onto the ships. Harbor security and the city gates will be disabled too.”

Mara nods, frowning in concentration. “But the slaves—
how
do I find them? I need to find out where Gorbals and Wing are so that I can make sure I get them on a ship. And what about the ships? Fox, how on Earth do I navigate a ship?”

Once again Mara feels overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what they are trying to do.

“The ships are preprogrammed,” says Fox. “We can work out something there. But the slaves—that's stumped me so far.” His brow wrinkles in thought. “The slaves aren't on the central identi-disk system, I'm sure. We've searched and searched and there's nothing. But I expected the whole slave labor situation would be top secret. We could try and hack into the rooks' system—I'm sure they operate in a hidden pocket of cyberspace, some black hole outside of the Noos—but it'll all be encrypted and it could take ages to break through. That's if we could. And they're sure to be able to track intruders into their system.
No, our best bet is …” he grins, “to use my connections. We need to go up to the Nux.”

“The Nux?”

“That's where the City Fathers have their private chambers. And it's where the Grand Father of All—my grandpa—lives and works. There might be something there that will tell us where the slaves are. If not—well, I'll just have to find some way to break into the rooks' system …”

Fear grips Mara's heart.

“Fox,” she asks breathlessly. “Can I—can I meet Caledon?”

“Do you want to?” he asks curiously.

And despite her fear, Mara knows that she does. Just to
see
.

The Nux is hidden away in the very heart of the city.

Fox takes her hand and leads her past a phalanx of city guards—they stand aside at a mere nod from him—up to the very top of a coil of stairs that winds up through a vertical tunnel shaft. When at last they reach the top, Mara's head is spinning. She looks around at the cavernous chambers and is disoriented.

And suddenly doubts that it's all real. She has an instinct that the grandeur of the Nux is an illusion, that she might actually be standing in an ordinary-sized hall and the apparent vastness is one big trick, a magic of mirror and light. The Nux is right above the cybercath's lofty dome—a ceiling that could itself be a mirror-trick designed to hide the existence of these secret chambers.

Before she can voice these thoughts to Fox, he puts out an arm and presses a red crystal button on a wall. Mara has walked right past it. “It's David,” he announces to the red button. “I'd like to see my grandfather.”

“Why are there no City Mothers or Grand Mothers of All?” Mara suddenly wonders.

“Well, there are a few. My grandmother was one. It's just—they're just called fathers because …” Fox trails off. “Well, I'm not sure why. I never thought about it before.”

Suddenly the wall parts like a metal curtain and a figure passes through the gap. He walks slowly toward them with a stiff, aged step. Mara's body tenses as the Grand Father of All stands in front of her.