I saw immediately il-Qurawi’s problem. Floor seven was entirely abandoned. In fact, except for some living quarters and outbuildings in the distance, and the barren and artificially landscaped “hills” and “valleys” built into the area, floor seven was nothing but a large and vacant loft a few stories above street level.
“What happened here, O Sir?” I asked.
Il-Qurawi turned around and casually indicated the entire floor. “This used to be a re-creation of Egypt at the time of the Ptolemies. I personally never saw the need for a consensual reality set in pre-Islamic times, but I was assured that certain academic experts wanted to reestablish the Library of Alexandria, which was destroyed by the Romans before the birth of the Prophet.”
“May the blessings of Allah be on him and peace,” I murmured.
Il-Qurawi shrugged. “It was functioning quite well, at least as well as the Martian colony, if not better, until one day it just…went away. The holographic images vanished, the specially created computer effects went offline, and nothing our creative staff did restored them. After a week or ten days of living in this emptiness, the people of Group 7 demanded a refund and departed.”
I rubbed my dyed beard. “O Sir, where are the controlling mechanisms, and how hard is it to achieve access to them?”
Il-Qurawi led me toward the northern wall. We had a good distance to hike. I saw that the floor was some molded synthetic material; it was probably the same as on floor twenty-six. All the rest was the result of the electronic magic of CRCorp — what they got paid for. I could imagine the puzzlement, then the chagrin, finally the wrath of the residents of floor seven.
We reached the northern wall, and il-Qurawi led me to a small metal door built into the wall about eye-level. He opened the door, and I saw some familiar computer controls while others were completely baffling to me; there were slots for bubble-plate memory units, hardcopy readout devices, a keyboard data-entry device, a voice- recognition entry device, and other things that were to some degree strange and unrecognizable to me. I never claimed to be a computer expert. I’m not. I just didn’t think it was profitable to let il-Qurawi know it.
“Wiped clean,” he said, indicating the hardware inside the door. “Someone got in — someone knowing where to look for the control mechanisms — and deleted all the vital programs, routines, and local effects.”
“All right,” I said, beginning to turn the problem over in my mind. It had the look of a simple crime. “Any recently discharged employee with a reason for revenge?”
Il-Qurawi swore under his breath. I admit it, I was a little shocked. That’s how much I’d changed since the old days. “Don’t you think we checked out all the simple solutions ourselves?” he grumbled. “Before we came to you? By the life of my children, I’m positive it wasn’t a disgruntled former employee, or a current one with plans for extortion, or any of the other easy answers that will occur to you at first. We’re faced with a genuine disaster: Someone is destroying consensual realities for no apparent reason.”
I blinked at him for a few seconds, thinking over what he’d just told me. I was standing in what had once been a replica of a strip of ancient civilization along the banks of the Nile River in pre-Muslim Egypt. Now I could look across the unfurnished space toward the other walls, seeing only the textured, generally flat floor in between. “You used the plural, O Sir,” I said at last. “How many other consensual realities have been ruined like this one?”
“Out of thirty rented floors,” he said quietly, “eighteen have been rendered inactive.”
I just stared. CRCorp didn’t just have a serious problem — it was facing extinction. I was surprised that the company hadn’t come to me sooner. Of course, il-Qurawi was the Chief of Security, and he probably figured that he could solve the mess himself. Finally, with no small degree of humiliation, I’m sure, he sought outside help. And he knew that I knew it. It was a good thing I wasn’t in a mood to rub it in, because I had all the ammunition I needed.
Il-Qurawi showed me a few other consensual realities, working ones and empty ones, because I asked him to. He didn’t seem eager for me to get too familiar with the CRCorp operation, yet if he wanted me to help with his difficulty, he had to give me a certain amount of access. He and his corporation were backed against the wall, and he recognized the truth of the matter. So I saw a vigorous CR based on an Eritrean-written fantasy-novel series almost a century old; and a successful CR that re-created a strict Sunni Islamic way of life that had never truly existed; and two more floors that were lifeless and unfurnished.
I decided that I’d seen enough for the present. Il-Qurawi thanked me for my time, wished me luck in my quest for the culprit, and hoped it wouldn’t take me too long to complete the assignment.
I said, “It shouldn’t be more than a day or two, inshallah. I already have some possibilities to investigate.” That was a lie. I was as lost as Qabeel’s spare mule.
He didn’t think it was necessary to accompany me back to my office. He just put me in the limousine with his driver. I didn’t care.
I got a scare when I got back to my office. During the time while I’d visited the CRCorp building, someone had defeated my expensive, elaborate security system, entered, and wiped my own CR hardware and software. The shabbiness had disappeared, replaced by the true polished floors and freshly painted walls of the office in the building. I’d worked diligently to reproduce the run-down office of Lufty Gad’s detective, al-Qaddani; but now the rooms were clean and new and sleek and modern. I was really furious. On my desk, under a Venetian glass paperweight, was a sheet of my notepaper with two handwritten words on it: A
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. I took out my prayer rug from the closet, spread it carefully on the floor, faced toward Makkah, and prayed. Then, my thoughts on higher things than CRCorp, I returned the rug to the closet. I sprawled in my chair behind the desk and stared at the notepaper. A
I didn’t want to look at my office space in its true, elegantly modern, fashionable form. Changing everything back the way it had been would be simple enough — I’d been wise enough to buy backups of everything from the small consensual-reality shop that had done up al-Qaddani’s office for me in the first place. It would take me half an hour to restore the slovenly look I preferred.
I was certain that Shaykh il-Qurawi had backups to his dysfunctional floors as well; it was only that CRCorp had tried to pass along the costs of the replacement to the residents, and they had balked, perhaps unanimously. I recalled an old proverb I’d learned from my mother, may Allah grant her peace: “Greed lessens what is gathered.” It was something CRCorp had yet to learn.
It also meant that everything that il-Qurawi had mentioned to me seemed to be close to its final resolution. I tipped a little from the office bottle into a tumbler and glanced at the setting sun through it. The true meaning — the actual one, the one that counted — had nothing to do with resolutions, however. I knew as well as I knew my childhood pet goat’s name that things were never this easy. Mark this down, it’s a free tip from an experienced operative (that means street punk): Things are never this easy. I’d known it before I started messing around on the street; then I’d learned it the simple way, from more experienced punks; and finally I’d had to learn it the hard way, too many times. Things are never this easy.
What I’m saying is that Simple Shaykh il-Qurawi knew perfectly well that he could do the same as I had, by way of chunking in the backup tapes, programs, and mechanisms. His echoing, forlorn floors would all quickly return to their fantasy factualities, and they’d probably be repopulated within days. CRCorp would then lose just a minimum of cash, and all the evil time could be filed away as just one of those bad experiences that had to be weathered by every corporation now and then.
Begging the question: Why, then, didn’t CRCorp use the backups immediately rather than suffer the angry defection of so many of its clients? And did il-Qurawi really think I was that stupid, that it all wouldn’t occur to me pretty damn fast?
Don’t ask me. I didn’t have a clue.
As the days went by, and the weeks, I learned through Bin el-Fadawin — CRCorp’s spy on floor twenty-six — that in fact some of the other floors had been restored, and some of their tenants had returned. Great, wonderful, I told myself, expecting il-Qurawi himself to show up with the rest of my money and possibly even a thank-you, although I don’t really believe in miracles.
Three weeks later I get a visitor from floor three. This was a floor that had been changed into a consensual- reality replica of a generation ship — a starship that would take generation upon generation to reach its goal, a planet merely called Home, circling a star named in the catalog simply as Wolf 359. They had years, decades, even
