Hunter teaches me to fight and to defend myself. He says all of the members of the tribe must know how to protect
himself
and each other from attack, and Papa Lo agrees. Even we shamans have to know some of the basic skills of combat. "You won’t always have the luxury of fighting in the Matrix," Hunter says. "Sometimes an enemy will come looking for you in the real world. Those times, it’s best to be somewhere else when they come looking, but if you can’t, then you need to know how to fight."
I learn to fight with my bare hands and with whatever weapons are at hand. Hunter says there are weapons all around to the warrior’s trained eye, but Hunter has the power of magic to improve his sight. His skill in combat is greater than any normal man’s and his speed is like a spirit of the Matrix—like electrons moving and responding at the speed of thought. Although I am very fast, I am no match for him in our sparring matches.
I am not the best student of hand-to-hand combat. I do better learning to shoot—Hunter says I have an eye for precision—but guns are not something the members of the tribe use casually. In the Rox they are difficult to find and more difficult to maintain and supply with ammunition. The tribe has guns, but they are carefully cared for and used sparingly.
One day while sparring, I tell Hunter about the fight with the ghoul and my escape, before he and some of the tribe’s warriors found me in the alley. I also tell him about the memory of the weapon I used to stop the ghoul from killing me. When I show him the mark on the back of my arm and then concentrate, a slim, dark blade snaps out like a striking snake.
"Ghost!" he cries and jumps back a step from me. The blade emerges from just behind my wrist and arcs smoothly over the back of my hand, slightly curved to fit the contour of my arm. There is almost no weight to it as I wave my arm slightly to test the feel of it. Hunter steps toward me again and seizes hold of my wrist to examine the blade. He lets out a low whistle as he runs a finger just above its rear edge.
"That is one nasty cutter, Babel," he says with respect. "I’ve seen plenty of street-muscle with razors but never anything quite like this. It’s like a standard spur, but the brushing on the arm-sheath is nearly invisible, and the blade looks like some kind of carbon-fiber composite. It would be almost impossible to detect, and the damn thing must be sharper than hell. Do you know where you got it?"
I shake my head. "Did I have it when I came to the tribe?" I ask and Hunter shrugs and shakes his own head in response.
"I don’t know, kid. You might have. We don’t have the kind of gear to scan people for cyber, but I doubt we would have found it even if we did. If you had it when you got grabbed by the Tamanous, it was already there." I still cannot recall anything from before awakening after my initiation, and the blade becomes another mystery for me. Hunter teaches me how to fight with it, and I learn that it is indeed "sharper than hell," able to tear through wood and plastic with ease, just as it sliced through the flesh and bone of Crawley’s wrist.
I ask Hunter and some of the others of the tribe about what I was like before my initiation, how I came to the tribe. They tell me I have been part of the Netwalkers for only a matter of months. I was barely getting by working the streets as a decker with the handle of Rook, the same name I gave to my first spirit helper. It is a fitting passing of the name, I am told. Papa Lo was impressed with my abilities after I did some work with the ’walkers and asked me to join the tribe.
Compared to the way I must have been scraping by, I could see why I accepted. While the Netwalkers do not live in luxury, we are better off than many of the people who live in the Rox, and the tribe takes good care of its own. I wonder about my life as a street-decker and where I came from before. Was I born in the Rox? It seems likely, since most of the people from here tend to stay. If the Rox is where you come from, there isn’t really anywhere else to go.
I learn more about the tribe’s history, its allies and enemies and my duties as a shaman. Only four of us have undergone the Deep Resonance and learned the Channels, to enter the Matrix without the hardware and equipment even Papa Lo still needs. That makes us important, and we have a responsibility to the tribe to travel in the Matrix, seeking the knowledge to help the tribe survive and prosper. Knowledge is power, and there are many secrets to be wrested from the spirits of the electron world that are worth something to the right people.
The trick is finding the right people and making sure they don’t kill you to get what you have.
Dragons
in
their
pleasant
palaces
.
—Isaiah 14:12
The young novice made his way quickly down the quiet halls of the lodge set high up on the slopes of Mount Shasta. The rest of the shamans and other inhabitants of the Shasta Lodge were settling in for the night, but Running Bird had a duty to fulfill before he could do so. He tried to calm his thoughts, following the instructions of his teachers to reach an inner core of peace and strength as he walked up to the great doors.
A knock on the double wooden doors of the chamber interrupted Hestaby’s meditation. She raised her head, the great eyes half-closed, and turned toward the entrance.
"Enter," she said, and the doors opened to admit Running Bird. He bowed deeply, hands folded before him, and the great dragon coiled in the room returned the bow with a nod of her great, scaled head.
"Forgive this interruption, Lady," the novice said in a quiet voice. "There is an incoming communication for you. It is encoded and tagged as most urgent."
Indeed?
Hestaby thought.
How
curious
. She inclined her head again in acknowledgement of the acolyte’s message.
"
Very
well,
Running
Bird
.
You
will
remain
and
speak
for
me
.
" The
young man was clearly taken aback by the command. To be privy to the great dragon’s secret communications was no small thing, but Hestaby did not doubt the loyalty of those closest to her.
"I, Lady?
As ... as you wish." He closed the door behind him and walked over to the communications console hugging the stone wall near where Hestaby’s great body spawled on the floor. With quiet efficiency, he tapped some keys and brought up a trideo image that filled much of the blank, whitewashed wall behind the console.
The image was of a complex fractal pattern, beautiful in its complexity. A few seconds after the console was engaged, the pattern dissolved and the image of a face appeared on the screen. It was an elf with dark hair swept back from his face, covering his pointed ears. But his sharp, elven features were as clear as if he were in the room with them. Hestaby’s voice spoke in Running Bird’s mind and he relayed the words. It felt almost like the
dragon were
using him as a mouthpiece, requiring no effort on his part.
"Leonardo," the novice’s voice said, "what an unexpected pleasure. To what do I owe the honor of taking you from your studies?"
The elf on the screen looked askance at Running Bird for a moment, and the novice felt the force of the dark gaze upon him. Leonardo shifted his attention back to Hestaby with a slight shrug, apparently deciding the dragon’s servant was of no concern to him. His voice was melodious and charming.
"I have called on a matter of mutual interest, gracious lady. We both have our opinions regarding the ways and the future of our peoples. Once those ideas placed us in the minority, but recent events have changed the course of the future and may offer opportunities for ... alternative viewpoints to be heard and listened to. I would very much like to meet with you to discuss the possibilities."
Hestaby cocked her great head to one side in a quizzical look as Leonardo spoke, and Running Bird waited for the dragon’s voice in his mind to tell him how to reply. There was a long moment of silence, and he looked back over his shoulder at his mistress. She nodded and the novice turned back to the screen as her thought-voice spoke through him.
"An interesting offer," Hestaby said, "one I would not have expected from you. There was a time when such a meeting would have been considered impossible."
"All the more reason to undertake it," Leonardo replied. "I have always been fond of accomplishing the impossible as, I believe, are you."
"There are those who will see a meeting such as this as a threat," Hestaby said, and Running Bird felt a slight chill as he spoke the words. Who could possibly threaten a dragon with the power of Hestaby, she who had once turned back an elven army from the slopes of Mount Shasta?
"Perhaps, but what is life without a little risk?" Leonardo replied.
Hestaby paused for another long moment, and Running Bird could almost hear the great dragon’s thoughts buzzing on the edge of his awareness before she spoke again in his mind and directed his voice toward the trideo screen.
"Very well.
Where do you wish to meet?" she asked. The elf gave an enigmatic smile that made his classic features seem to light up with pleasure.
"How about my place?"
* * *
In a vast arcology on the banks of the Rhur, a great dragon lay curled up like a sleeping cat on the fine marble floor of a room large enough to serve as a hangar for a private jet. Giant columns supported the vaulted ceiling and fine carvings decorated the stone walls. The room was solid, cool, and gave off a comforting atmosphere for a creature used to lairing in great mountain caves.
Unlike those lairs of old, there were no piles of treasure,
no
picked bones, or rusted weapons belonging to foolish would-be dragonslayers. The room was clean and dry, filled with the heavy musk of reptilian scales and the faint charred odor of smoke. There was no furniture and no windows—save those open to display computer graphics or information—the room’s sole inhabitant needed neither.
The vast room in Saeder-Krupp’s world headquarters in the Rhine-Rhur megaplex was jokingly known as "the corner office" by the dragon’s minions. They thought he was unaware of their nickname for his lair, but there was precious little the great dragon Lofwyr, President and Chairman of the Board of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries, was not aware of.
All the
dragon needed was the collection of moving images filling most of one wall of the great chamber. The display screens on the wall provided a steady flow of information to keep his vast mind occupied. A visitor to the room might have suspected that Lofwyr was asleep. Sitting curled up with his great, wedge-shaped head resting on his forelegs, large golden eyes nearly hidden beneath their heavy lids, the dragon stared languidly at the video wall. It was just before dawn in Germany, and few people were awake in the vast arcology. Lofwyr’s mind, however, was ever active, following all of the input from those screens while simultaneously juggling a dozen different thoughts at once.
Some of the windows open on the video-wall provided updates on the activities of Saeder-Krupp and its many subsidiaries and interests across the globe. Saeder-Krupp was the largest megacorporate conglomerate in the world. Overseeing the hundreds of companies it controlled would be a monumental feat for a human CEO, but for Lofwyr the intricacies of corporate politics and economics were something to keep his mind occupied. He reviewed the activities of dozens of companies a minute, storing away the information and keeping mental notes he would later dictate to his servants to carry out. Stock information, buyouts, the rise and fall of businesses around the world, all took up a mere fraction of the dragon’s attention.
Other windows displayed information about Lofwyr’s other interests. There were few things in the Sixth World in which he did not take at least some interest, so displays of new trideo programs, documentaries, stock portfolios, and other pieces of data gathered by Lofwyr’s agents, both living and artificial, decorated the video-wall for his edification and amusement. Toxic spills in the North Sea, gun-running in Southeast Asia, another border skirmish in China, political polls from the United Canadian and
The dragon had a vast network of agents in every country devoted to nothing more than feeding information into his hungry brain for him to digest: updates, rumors, and secrets from all over the world.
Despite the vast amount of data rushing past on the display before him, the great dragon seemed almost bored, impatiently waiting for something to happen. He
huffed
a great sigh, sending small trickles of smoke pouring from his nostrils as he kept watch over the world through the magic of modern technology, thinking of the days when a magical mirror or pool would have served in place of the video wall. But such tools were not as quick or efficient as the power of the Matrix for processing information. Modern technology had its uses.
A musical tone interrupted the hubbub of the many display windows, and Lofwyr’s eyes widened, his head lifting slightly from where it rested. A red indicator on the display flashed "incoming transmission." The dragon’s lips curled slightly in an almost-smile that would have chilled the blood of any Saeder-Krupp employee present in the room. Lofwyr smiled only rarely. It always meant the dragon had found something interesting to him, and no one wanted to be the object of Lofwyr’s interest.