"Yes, some of the other Sisters mentioned a stranger," Sidri added quietly. Even after an evening and night spent in their company, she still had not looked anyone full in the face. "They said she must bring bad luck, because a young woman from the Upper Pantry Clerks ran away the night she arrived and has not been seen since."
The time had come to separate—Zekiel and Sidri to continue their journey away from all that they knew, Renie and the others to travel toward the place the young lovers had fled. Renie looked at the pair, colorless as creatures bred in a cavern, but so absorbed in each other and their plans that she knew she and her own companions were no more than an incident in these lovers' story.
"So if we find this Library Market," Florimel said to Zekiel, "we can ask questions there? No one will think us odd?"
He looked at her for a moment, then turned his gaze on T4b and !Xabbu. A smile creased his long face. "You will not be ignored, that is certain. Perhaps you should try to find some clothing in one of the big empty rooms—scavengers often do well in such old places, and I think these have not been searched before."
Renie could not understand how people could live full-time in a single house, however large, yet leave an entire wing unexplored for generations, but the ins and outs of the simworld were of less interest to her just now than the very real possibility that they might find the spy.
Zekiel and Sidri stood awkwardly for a moment at the edge of the walkway island, their path stretching before them. "Farewell," said the pale young man. "And thanks to you."
"We have done nothing," Martine told him. "You have helped us, though, and told us many useful things."
He shrugged. "It has been nice to spend time among people and to hear friendly voices. I do not think we shall be so lucky again for a while." As he spoke, Sidri reached for his hand and clutched it, like someone chilled by watching a funeral procession. Still holding hands, they turned and began to walk away.
"But where is this house?" Renie called after them.
Zekiel paused. "I was only a cutlerer," he said. "That is a question better asked of the Library Brothers, who understand the workings of the universe."
Frustrated, Renie let out a sharp breath. "No, where is it? Where in the world?"
Now Sidri, too, was looking at her in surprise, as though Renie had begun quizzing them about differential calculus. "We do not understand your questions," the young woman said shyly.
"Where . . . Let's put it this way. When you get to the end of the house, what is there? What do you find?"
Zekiel shrugged. "The sky, I suppose. The stars."
They waved and set off again, leaving Renie to try to work out where the conversation had gone off-track.
They found clothes two floors below, in a room that had obviously not been explored recently, since even the cobwebs were empty and clotted with dust. Chest after chest stood stacked in dangerously unstable piles that nevertheless had survived the years without tumbling. Renie and the rest of the company tried to be careful, but their first attempts set one such tower swaying, then the whole thing came down in a series of thunderous crashes.
"Well," Renie said, "everyone for miles is going to know someone's in here now."
Florimel pulled a heavy blanket from the wreckage of a sprung chest, unfolding it to expose an unreadable monogram interlaced with a stylized picture of a lantern. "From what the young man told us, no one would be much surprised to know someone was scavenging." She wadded the blanket and heaved it to one side.
Renie found a pile of foundation garments in one of the other trunks and lifted out a corset that was positively knobby with whalebone. "I know clubs in the Golden Mile back home where you would be the hit of the night in this, Florimel. Actually, there are lots of clubs where T4b would be pretty popular wearing it, too." She found a long blue skirt with a pattern of golden leaves and held it up, taking a couple of steps to see how the fabric moved, then frowned. "This feels too much like a game of dress-up," she said. "But we're not just trying to fit in—we're trying to catch a murderer."
"I have not forgotten," said Florimel.
"So what are we going to do if we find . . . her, him, whatever it is?"
Florimel was trying on a once-colorful cape, although from what Renie had seen of Zekiel's and Sidri's clothes, Florimel's Temilún peasant garb was not likely to raise any eyebrows in this world- "If we find the spy without him knowing we are here, we will try to take him by surprise," she said. "If not, plans will mean little. He is not the kind to surrender. We will have to overcome him by force."
Renie did not like the sound of that. "You seem very sure it's a 'he.' "
Florimel's lip curled. "It is a man, although I cannot pretend I guessed until we fought with him. That kind of hatefulness feels different when it comes from a woman."
"Whatever it is—he is—he scared me to death."
Florimel nodded somberly. "He would have killed us all if it suited him, without a second thought."
"Renie!" !Xabbu called from the other side of the mountain range of boxes and chests. "Come and see!"
She left the German woman unpacking a case full of what looked like opera gloves. !Xabbu was perched on the open lid of a huge steamer trunk, T4b standing stiffly before him in a huge gray robe, belted at the middle with a braided length of white and green strands. His robot helmet seemed ridiculously out of place, like a UFO perched on a mountaintop, but when she suggested he take it off, the young man balked.
"She is right," !Xabbu said quietly. "We must not attract too much attention. Our lives will be at stake."
T4b looked helplessly to Emily, but she only grinned, enjoying his discomfort. With a shrug that seemed to convey his surrender to an unfair universe, he carefully removed the masked helmet. His hair was pressed to his head in realistically sweaty ringlets around his long, sullen face. On either side, above his ears, a long streak of white ran through the black.
"Coyote stripes," was his defiant answer to Renie's question—apparently the current height of Los Hisatsinom fashion.
"Here, let me rub some dust on your face," she said.
T4b caught at her hand. "Whatcha doing, you?"
"Do you really want to walk around this old-fashioned place with those glowing subdermals shouting, I'm probably a warlock or something, so you better burn me at the stake'? No? I didn't think so."
He grudgingly allowed her to dirty his face and hide the Goggleboy designs. "So what about my helmet?" he demanded. "Chance not I'm leaving it here."
Florimel leaned around the nearest stack of boxes. "Turn it upside down and it will look like you are collecting for some charity. Perhaps people will throw money in it."
"Wild funny," he growled.
Martine, who wore peasant clothes like Florimel's, had not bothered to augment her wardrobe; as Renie pulled a skirt over the bottom half of her jumpsuit, the blind woman slid down from her seat on a box. "If you are all ready, we should move on. Half the day is gone, and people are always more suspicious of strangers who arrive by night."
"How can you even tell what time of day it is?" Renie asked.
"The place has rhythms," Martine replied. "And I am getting to know them. Now let us continue."
Zekiel's directions had been very general—half a day's walk in more or less one direction, and a dozen floors downward—but even before they reached the level of the river's passage through the house they began to see signs of human habitation. Flat stones had been placed in the middle of some of the wider corridors and used as fireplaces, although everything but the scorch marks had been removed from the sites; they could hear murmurings from some of the ornately screened ventilation ducts that might only have been wind, but could just as easily have been faint voices.
Renie also noticed something she could only distinguish because of its long absence from their lives: the growing scent of a human habitat, a scent both heartening and disturbing—heartening because it confirmed they were getting nearer to where the people were, d
isturbing because Renie suddenly realized she was reacting to her own full-blown sense of smell.
But when I was first in the network—when I still could feel my mask—we could barely smell anything. I was just talking the other day about how !Xabbu complained about it.
She asked him. He continued to pace on all fours beside her as he considered. "Yes, that is true," he said at last. "It was very frustrating, but I have not felt that way for some time. In fact, it seems as though now I learn much from what my nose tells me." He wrinkled his narrow forehead. "But perhaps it is an illusion. Have I not read during my courses at the Poly that after a long time in a virtual environment the brain begins to construct information for itself to make things seem more normal?"
"You were a good student," Renie said, smiling. "But that still doesn't seem enough to explain this." She shrugged. "But what do we know, really? There's never been an environment like this before. Still, we should have a better idea of how it works by now—how we can be kept online, and how things like neurocannulas, or even something as obvious as a mask, can be kept from us." She frowned, thinking it through. "In fact, that's the strangest thing about this environment. It could send information through a direct neural connection to tell the brain there is no neural hookup, no shunt. That makes sense. But you and I have a different, more basic kind of access which doesn't bypass our own senses, just adds to them. So how can we be fooled?"
They still had no answer for the question when the party descended the last bend of another exhaustive length of staircase to discover they had finally reached the river. The water, which had been a murmur in their ears for the last three floors of the descent, flowed past them along a mossy stone trough thirty meters across and flush with the floor, as though some ancient Roman aqueduct had been buried in the foundation. A lantern, the first light they had reached not of their own making, hung from a small dock that jutted from the hallway at the base of the stairs. The water was almost invisible in the weak light, rushing away into the shadows on their right.
"Upriver, then," Renie declared. "If the rest of what those two said is also true, we should have only about another hour's walk to reach the part of the house where people are." She stopped, aware of the incongruity. "Jesus Mercy, how big is this place?"
The architecture fronted by the hallway was more varied than the rooms which they had encountered above, as though more modification had been done to the parts of the building that lined the river. Doors opened off the hall as they had higher up, and were visible along the dim walkway on the river's far side as well, but there were also places where the walls had been knocked out, perhaps to improve the view, or elaborate additions had been built outward so that they jutted above the surface of the river, with the blocked hallway detouring along a catwalk that hung only a few meters over the gurgling waters.
As they made their way around one such obstruction, stopping to peer into the riverside windows at the room's empty interior, a boat with a lantern dangling from its bow slid past them on the far side of the river. Renie turned, startled by the movement, but the two shapes huddled in the small vessel only waved, then went back to paddling. Within moments the craft had slipped away into darkness.
Signs of habitation began to show more frequently now, and in places they could even see the lights of fires and lanterns burning on the far side of the river. More occupied fishing boats appeared; some simply drifted past, but others moved purposefully from one side of the river to the other as though searching for something. Renie could hear music and voices in some of the upper apartments, scratchy jigs played on stringed instruments, people shouting or laughing.
About a thousand meters past the first lantern, by which point they were walking through what was for all intents and purposes a small harbor town, albeit contained inside a larger structure like a ship in a bottle, Renie saw something she had not seen in several days.
"Daylight!" She pointed to windows high above them. The slanting sunlight spilled down across the clutter of jerry-built apartments which had been grafted onto the original halls, and which leaned so close above the river on both sides that it almost seemed the residents could reach across the water to borrow a cup of sugar. The huge windows and the wall in which they were situated were almost completely hidden by the crowding roofs of shanties. "I'm going to go have a look."
Only !Xabbu chose to join her, the others opting instead for a rest, seating themselves on barrels along a deserted wharf. Renie and the Bushman mounted a set of rickety stairs that wound in and out from one landing to the next, connecting perhaps two dozen shacks in its twenty-meter climb. People were obviously at home in some of the dwellings, and once as she passed an open door, a woman in a black bonnet and dress actually looked up from her sewing and met Renie's eyes. She did not seem surprised by strangers on the stairs, even though one of the strangers was a monkey.
The last landing still left them well below the nearest window, and Renie was about to content herself with just the glimpse of true daylight—she could see clouds drifting past, and the sky was a reassuringly normal blue—when !Xabbu said, "Over here!" He had found a ladder balanced against the back of the topmost apartment, a way to get up onto the roof, someone's refuge from the rest of the crowded shantytown. As she followed him up the rungs sagged alarmingly beneath her weight, but she was hungry now to see the world . . . or at least whatever world they had been given.
!Xabbu reached the top of the ladder and turned to the window, then frowned in puzzlement. Renie joined him, a couple of rungs below, eager to see the rest of the house and its grounds, or at least the part which lay below them.
Her first disconcerting realization was that they were not above much of the house at all, but only partway up one of the lower structures. The sky was real, but it was visible only between two other wings of the building, both of which rose far above their vantage point—higher even than the distance Renie and her companions had descended since leaving Zekiel and Sidri. The other disturbing thing was that there were no grounds to be seen whatsoever, except for a few glimpses lit by angling sunlight of roof gardens nestled between cupolas, or even one tucked into the wreckage of an ancient, broken dome. Instead, the house continued as far beyond the window as she could see, a stunning conglomeration of halls and towers and other structures for which she had no names, all connected in a labyrinthine whole, rooftops and chimneys spreading away and growing smaller and smaller with distance, an undifferentiated, choppy sea of gray and brown shapes that at last grew dim in the fading golden light.
"Jesus Mercy," Renie murmured. She could think of nothing else to say, so she said it again.
She was reluctant to share her discovery with the others, although her better sense told her that whether the house had an ending or not made little difference to either their hunt or their chances for escaping the simulation; it was only after Florimel had asked a series of increasingly irritated questions that she told them exactly what she had seen.
". . . And it looked like we could walk for months without reaching the outside," she finished. "Like a city, but all one building."
Florimel shrugged. "It makes little difference."
T4b, his sangfroid restored by a long time on level ground, said, "These sayee lo Grail-hoppers got too much time, too much money. I had something like this network, be making something bold tasty, me—no dupping."
Florimel rolled her eyes. "Let me guess . . . half-naked Gogglegirls with gigantic breasts, and plenty of loud music and guns and cars and charge, yes?"
T4b nodded vigorously, impressed by her perceptiveness and taste.
The byways along the river were beginning to fill with people abroad on errands both personal and commercial. Renie was relieved to see that she and her friends were not quite so unusual as she had feared: some of the locals were as pale as Zekiel and Sidri had been, but overall there was a fairly wide range of colors and sizes, although she had seen none yet she would call black. Of course, she remembered, her own cur
rent sim was not all that dark-skinned either. Even !Xabbu's current form did not seem to stretch convention too far, since Renie saw animals being driven to market, and even a few riding on their owners' shoulders, pigeons and a rat or two, that were clearly pets. In fact, as they followed the river shore which had widened out now into a boardwalk lined with makeshift peddlers' shops selling caps and rope and dried fish, Renie and her companions were quickly becoming just part of the crowd.
They stopped and asked an old man repairing a fishing net for directions to the Library Market, and although he seemed amused at the idea of someone not knowing where that was, he cheerfully instructed them. Wide hallways perpendicular to the boardwalk now opened into the main corridor at regular intervals, like the intersections of major streets, and when Renie and the others reached a particularly wide boulevard marked at the corner by a round-eyed bird carved on a wooden sign, they turned and headed away from the river, struggling through the thick crowd.
Black Owl Street was roofed with timbers, apparently a late addition, but was even broader than the boardwalk and more upscale as well, lined with shops and taverns and even restaurants. Some of the busy crowd wore clothes as antiquely idiosyncratic as those of Renie and her friends, but others, particularly men, were garbed in what to Renie seemed a nineteenth century style. black frock coats and trousers, or the same clothes in only slightly more imaginative hues of dark blue or dark brown, like counting-house employees in a Dickens novel. She half-expected to see Ebenezer Scrooge fingering his watch chain and cursing the rabble.
Lost in people-watching, Renie was brought up short by Martine's hand on her arm.
"Just a moment. . . ." The blind woman cocked her head, then shook it. "No, nothing."
"What did you think you heard? Or felt?"