Free City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams Page B

future."
    "I wanted you to finish telling me about Jack!" She hurried into the changing room and put her clothes back on. The plastic bag had kept them dry, just like it was supposed to.
    "Ah, yes," Mister Sellars said when she returned. "And what was Jack doing when we stopped?"
    "He climbed up the Beanstalk and he was in the Giant's Castle." Christabel was faintly offended that he didn't remember. "And the Giant was coming back soon!"
    "Ah, so he was, so he was. Poor Jack. Well, that's where we shall begin when you come back to visit me next time. Now, on your way." He carefully patted her head. The way his face looked, she thought it might hurt his hand to touch her, but he always did it.
    She was most of the way out the door when she remembered something she wanted to ask him about his plants. She turned and came back, but Mister Sellars had closed his eyes again and sunk back into his chair. His long, spidery fingers were moving slowly, as though he were finger-painting on the air. She stared for a moment-she had never seen that before and thought maybe it was some special exercise he had to do-then realized that clouds of steam were drifting past her into the hot afternoon air. She quickly went out again and pulled the door closed behind her. The exercises, if that was what they were, had seemed private and a little creepy.
    He had been moving his hands in the air like someone who was on the net, she suddenly realized. But Mister Sellars hadn't been wearing a helmet or one of those wires in his neck like some of the people who worked for her daddy. He had just had his eyes closed.
    Her wristband was blinking even faster. Christabel knew it would only be a few more minutes before her mother called Portia's house. She didn't waste time skipping as she went back over the footbridge.

CHAPTER 3
Empty Signal Gray
----
    NETFEED/NEWS: Asia's Leaders Declare "Prosperity Zone"
    (visual: Empress Palace, Singapore City)
    VO: Asian politicians and business leaders meeting in Singapore, led by aging and reclusive Chinese financier Jiun Bhao and Singapore's Prime Minister Low-
    (visual: Low Wee Kuo and Jiun Bhao shaking hands)
    -agreed on a historical trade agreement which Jiun calls a "Prosperity Zone" that would give Asia an unprecedented economic unity.
    (visual: Jiun Bhao, supported by aides, at press lectern)
    JIUN: "The time has come. The future belongs to a united Asia. We are full of hope, but we know there is hard work ahead. . . ."
----
    It stretched before them from horizon to horizon, its millions of byways like scratches on glass under extreme magnification-but in every one of those scratches, lights flickered and minute objects moved.
    "There cannot be any place so big!"
    "But it's not a place, remember-not a real place. The whole thing is just electronic impulses on a chain of very powerful computers. It can be as big as the programmers can imagine."
    !Xabbu was silent for a long moment. They hung side by side, twin stars floating in an empty black sky, two angels gazing down from heaven at the immensity of humankind's commercial imagination.
    "The girl arose," !Xabbu said at last. "She put her hands into the wood ashes. . . ."
    "What?"
    "It is a poem-or a story-made by one of my people:
    "The girl arose; she put her hands into the wood ashes; she threw the ashes up into the sky. She said to them: 'The wood ashes which are here, they must together become the Milky Way. They must lie white along the sky. . . .' "
    He stopped as if embarrassed. "It is something of my childhood. It is called 'The Girl of the Early Race Who Made the Stars.' Being here, what you have done-they brought it back to me."
    Now Renie was embarrassed, too, although she was not quite sure why. She flexed her fingers to take them instantly down to ground level. Lambda Mall, the main tradeground of the entire net, surrounded them completely. The Mall was a nation-sized warren of simulated shopping districts, a continent of information with no shore.