Some had learned how to beg for ready cash, too. Sitting in a back alley eating a treat, he watched a one-eyed woman who saw better than most could with two. She was getting dressed for her trade and, for a small coin, let Toby watch. Smooth-faced, she daubed on makeup, adding hideous blue hollows under the eyes. A light, comfortable sheath slid over her calf, making her spider-walk like a cripple.
Toby watched her set up shop on a busy corner. People threw her coins and looked away. Somehow the illogic of it—surely there were treatments for such ailments?—didn’t rob the trade of a jot of its credibility. Toby couldn’t fathom why, but then glimpsed a possibility. She was providing a form of ego-boosting entertainment. Looking at her miserable self, passersby could feel a rush of gladness: troubled they might be, but not that badly. She was in show business.
These weren’t the demigods who made the Chandeliers, no.
There was a sprawling tangle of streets designed to separate people looking for amusement from their cash. Games, booths, things to throw at for a prize—and others where somebody got to throw at you. Dance halls open eternally, fever-bright, with syntho-music that wound around on a long loop, filming the air with prickly scents and startling pheromone-triggers. Toby lingered in one, and then in a brief moment when the effects turned off (required by law), he saw what was happening to him and his pocket change. He went back to wandering the streets, which was at least cheaper, though his nervous system kept trying to make his feet circle back.
There were science games and events, operating right next to fortune-tellers, a tribute to humanity’s ability to believe two contradictory things at once. Hawkers of wonders. Gambling. Feats of strength (care to try?). Dispensers of drugs and even alcohol, all legal and heavily taxed to offset their probable social effects. Soft drink stands, one offering an ancient dark bubbly fluid that Toby hated and threw away, shocking some kids. They seemed insulted that he hadn’t liked the authentic folk treat, Koca-Koola, rich and true. But the paprika was enough to turn his tongue.
He began to get the sense of a city again, after years on the move. Citadel Bishop had been a rambling, dusty pueblo on a canyon floor. It had water-starved gardens and one broad plaza—nothing compared with this. He had seen ruins of a lesser Arcology at a distance—the mechs were stripping it for materials at the time—and this place resembled that.
The brisk order reminded him of how restful it was to cook a meal, knowing that lamp oil or salt was just around a corner, available. Of how a girl, crossing a street, never paused but swung her head both ways before stepping off the curb. Of how hypnotizing it had been, as a boy, to sit at an upstairs window and watch the people parade past on a sidewalk, oblivious that they were passing actors in his imaginary dramas. Cities—a magical compression of humanity, a vessel he could learn.
Toby imagined that his new language-chip must be glowing white-hot, with all the use he was giving it. No set of rigid digital rules can blanket a sprawling, living language, any more than a fine silk handkerchief can cover a slattern. Most of what Toby heard was quick, vivid, direct. Fine for bargaining, but not nuances. He knew as little of those as a dog does of doggerel. Tradeswomen gave him an eye and tried to guess his birthplace from his vowels, thinking he had come from places named Ragpicker, or Avalon, or Tuscaloosa. From his size alone they knew he was from the Hunker Down Families, shaped by mech war and gravity, but they guessed Jacks or Queens, not Bishops or Knights.
There was a band of kids his own age that showed passing, mild interest in where he was from, what he had seen—and then quickly focused back on their own amusements. Their talk was quick, amusing, slangy, hard to follow. Mostly they just lounged around scruffy back alleys, absorbed, tinkering with gadgets.
They wore padded goggles, headphones, gloves and boots, curiously heavy things. Toby tried them on while they snickered knowingly, and found himself immersed in a sensorium of a forest. Big animals came charging out of the thickets, roaring and flashing huge teeth. A fierce cat-creature with tawny fur bowled Toby over—an odd sensation, because he also could feel himself still standing upright, while his eyes and ears told him that he was tumbling head over heels.
After a few minutes he got the knack of this game, though, and started shooting at the animals. They were pretty easy to hit. He tired of that and so tossed aside the weapon he had found in his pseudo-hand. He wrestled the next animal, a big lizard with hot red eyes. It pseudo-scratched and bit him, painful, slashing—all real enough impressions, but somehow disconnected because Toby knew they weren’t anything more than electrical stimuli from a machine, blurred and oddly hollow.
Then it struck him—his own in-built systems did this, but finer-grained. His eyes could ratchet through the spectrum, pick up Dopplered targets, fix ranges and calibrations with the blink of an eyelid, a touch of a tongue to the right tooth. His servos cut in without prompting. All specialized survival gear, added to him before he could do more than squall and fill his diapers.
But here, such skills were exotic, down-wonder stuff. Other uses of the same tech were playthings.
He threw the big scabby lizard a few times and it threw him, until he got tired of the putrid reek of the leathery green skin, a stench of the rotting meat wedged in its teeth. The kids were there in the jungle around him, shooting and laughing and running around—all without having to do anything for real, or even move their own legs or arms.
They liked Toby’s idea of wrestling the animals, and one of them got mock-crushed by a huge leprous rat with purple whiskers. But then Toby tired of that, too, and took his helmet off. The kids stayed in the game, though, their arms and legs jerking with fake hits and kicks, fingers tightening around imaginary triggers, killing ghost-creatures that seethed before their blinded eyes. He sat and watched them for a while, slumped into doorways, clasped in momentary action, thrilling to pseudo-lives they could lead as an amusement.
They were fun kids, but to them the world was just a bunch of signs and symbols and electronic fakery. They had elaborate, hip reasons why their world was better than the crude press of slow-witted reality—a philosophy, Toby thought, for people who spent too much time indoors. He wandered off and went for a real walk through a real park and though there were no exciting big green lizards, he liked it better.
That was where Quath found him. The hulking mass did not need to fight the crowds; they got out of the way. And Toby knew she was coming before he even saw her. Into his sensonium pushed a brooding, anxious curtain. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
SEVEN
Animal Spirits
<You are sought.>
“By you, anyway, big-bug,” Toby said to cover his surprise. “People give you any trouble getting here?”
<I hurried and did not notice.>
“That big, I guess you can not notice whatever you like. Then too, I don’t think the devil himself on red stilts would turn many heads here.”
<I suffered no interruptions.> Quath clanked and squeaked and many-legged her way into a sitting posture, which Toby knew was a sign that she was serious. Her great head lowered to get under a willowy tree limb. <I was sorry that I could not visit you in your cell.>
“You couldn’t have gotten in the door,” Toby said with a lightness he didn’t feel.
<I have finished with the questioning they required.>