Context (44 page)

Dusty
street…

[[Partial immersion: all senses engaged,
but not to full extent.]]

Dusty street, and the round
movement of Querelle—a virtual Quarrel—between her thighs.

[[Trickle-stimulus only, by
cerebellar induction: she wanted to feel the v-cological world; but reality
remained her anchor.]]

There are swing doors, a dark
saloon.

And the sound of honky-tonk, a
badly tuned piano.

Ro smiles and
[[shifting awkwardly on the
floor, in reality]]
swings her leg back, and dismounts.

Then she stands in the dusty main
street, hands upon her hips, regarding the frontier town around her.

Lounging cowboys, forearms
resting on hitching rails to which their horses are tethered. One of them, his
eyes pale and expressionless, spits liquid brown tobacco into the dirt; his
gaze never leaves Ro.

Respectable women, parasols held
high, pass quickly by. Overhead, from two half-open windows, saloon girls make
conversation; occasionally, cold interest flickers as they recognize a man
walking on the boards below.

[[Ro gestured for the ongoing
scenario to pause. For a moment, she considered ending it totally.

There was only one drama on the
crystal cassette, but it was immense, branching through an incredible number of
possible logic-paths depending on the viewer’s responses. If there was some
clue to Anne-Louise’s killer buried in here, it was going to take a huge effort
to find it.

But already she wondered whether
there was a hint, in the name of the virtual horse she—as the story’s viewpoint
observer—appeared to be riding in that nonexistent dusty town. For the horse
was called Querelle (and Ro knew that, in reality, Anne-Louise had rented
Quarrel from Alice Bridcombe’s stables more than once); while the old
technology on which the cassette was based had been called
queral:
quantum-neural
networks threaded through a semi-organic substrate.

Or perhaps it was coincidence,
and this was too early in the storyline to tell what, exactly, was going on.

She gestured.

‘Resume narrative.’]]

Stagecoach.

It comes to a halt before the
hotel. The horses are dust-covered and panting. The driver’s face is lined with
anxiety.

Two young men come from the
hotel, chatting cheerily. One climbs to the stagecoach roof, begins throwing
luggage down to his waiting partner. Meanwhile, the stagecoach’s door opens—creaking,
a little unsteady — and the passengers begin to dismount.

Ro assumes that this is where the
main plot thread begins.

What had the Ranger said?

“The answer’s in Shadowville.’
With a laconic grin: ‘But there ain’t no shortcut, darlin’. Ya gotta see for
yourself.’

But there is no sign of him here,
in this part of the story.

A finely gowned woman steps down
to the dusty ground. Next, a fleshy, well-groomed man with dark moustache and fine
grey hat
[[and
<Agent>>
flashed a helpful text overlay, then vanished]]
exits the
stagecoach, stops, and looks around. He appears unarmed, but Ro looks at the
way he holds his left arm: crooked, ready to slide a hidden derringer from
sleeve to hand in a split second.

The agent tips his hat to Ro.

‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance.
I’m
—’

[[‘Cut.’ Ro stopped the flow. ‘I
really don’t have time for this.’]]

The dusty western town stands
still.

No-one
could possibly have the time to play out every variation. Life was way too
short.

If Anne-Louise’s ghost expected
Ro to spend days in her fictional world, like some dumb character in a drama
within a melodrama, she was going to be very disappointed.

Time for a more direct approach.

‘Sorry, Ranger Shade.’ She opened
up her lowest-level debugging displays. ‘I’m afraid this is going to hurt.’

And later, when she realized just
how complex Anne-Louise’s story was, there was only one comment to add:

‘Shit. This writing business is
harder than it looks.’

The
story’s framework supported evolution of the teleological kind: directed
towards a specific climactic goal. The fractal-consistency milieu generators
were unlike anything Ro had worked with; the allegory engine, with its quotient
of real philosophical concepts to be embedded within the story, was beyond her
understanding.

And as for characters: Ranger
Shade was frozen, his code modules splayed open like dissected organs in Ro’s
analytical holovolumes.

‘Three levels, drill in. Continue
five clockpulses.’

A hundred tesseracts flared:
illuminating the Shade persona’s internal state variables, tracking the
operations through breakpoints.

‘Stop. Compare shadow.’

The system now showed two sets of
holovolumes: two snapshots, taken five nanoseconds apart in the story’s
v-cology.

There was a cliché-satire factor
tree: simple weighting coefficients could flip the obviously banal into the
hundred per cent subversive. No big trick either way: a simple matter of
accepting or twisting each labelled stereotype as it was instantiated.

From stupid bestseller to
profound literature, with a handful of numbers. Neat.

Ro checked the settings that
Anne-Louise had picked, found them ranging the intermediate values with
occasional wild surprises, in accordance with some convoluted fuzzy algorithm.

Throughout the core, there lurked
century-old inherited code fragments, written in the evolution-oriented
objectilogical language known as Chocolate. Once globally popular, now
consigned to the same historical niche as assembler programming: as out-of-date
as quill and parchment writing.

Some of the Chocolate daemons
were buried so deeply that they were like human mitochondria: fundamental
components of every cell, which at some point in bio-evolutionary prehistory
had been a separate species of bacteria. The complexity was staggering; Ro could
only be thankful that the story’ s v-cology was standalone, devoid of links to
the greater infraclusters and ‘warenations of Every Ware.

Querelle. Was the horse emulation’s
name significant?

‘The answer’s in Shadowville.’
Maybe.
‘But there ain ‘t no
shortcut.’

Parallel-trace debuggers tore
through Ranger Shade’s lifetime code.

Ah ...What about this?

She had found one strange,
recurrent insertion. Recurring, but anomalous. It disobeyed some of the
natural-law context/continuity rules which governed the story’s other scenes,
as defined in the master look-up matrix. And it occurred only when there were
no other characters in Shade’s virtual vicinity.

Did a clue he in the software
code which represented this one character’s actions in all possible scenarios?
In what would have been Ranger Shade’s thoughts and memories, had he been a
real, living being?

Anomalies...

Ro picked one scene at random.

‘Let’s take a look.’

She flipped modes, became an
invisible, passive observer.

Activated playback.

‘Ah,
Juanita…’

Clint Shade, leaning against the
hitching rail outside his simple farmhouse, looks at the sparkling yet
insubstantial figure of the woman beside him. The whisky tumbler in his left
hand is almost empty.

‘My dearest man.’ Outlines of
distant saguaro show through her spectral figure, her wistful smile. ‘Are you
troubled, love?’

‘Yeah.’ He looks away. ‘Nothing
new, huh?’

‘Anything you would care to share
with your wife?’

Shade laughs. A strange sound in
the flat desert air.

‘My dead wife, you mean. Shouldn‘t
I let you rest in peace ?’

For a moment, stillness.

Then, ‘There’s little enough
peace for me here.’ Her voice is almost a sigh. ‘You know that, my love.’

‘I know.’

He glances back at his home, then
turns to stare at the flat red horizon, layered with the mesa’s purple stain.

‘What’s your score so far, Clint?’

‘Two, since you ask.’

‘And the others?’