Verity (part 11)
The sun shone down on the beach, like a molten ball in the sky, hazed by smoke. Mountains loomed through the smog-veil in the distance. The waves tumbled on the shore, tossing the salt spray and filling Jim's nose with the scent of fish and seaweed and salt. There were people on the beach, running, lying in the sun, playing beach volleyball, kids screaming in excitement. Yet the sound of the people was strangely muted.
"Jim?" The voice was quiet, but it drowned out all the other sounds.
"Sandburg." Jim turned and saw his friend, standing barefoot in the sand. He was thin, but what was more disturbing, he was translucent, as if he were fading away to nothing. As if he were a ghost. "Sandburg? What's happened? What's the matter?"
Blair scowled. "What's the matter? I can't get it out, that's what's the matter! I've tried and I've tried."
"Don't give up, Chief."
Blair ignored him; he looked out at the ocean. "Don't you think the beach is the best place? The border between land and sea, between the known and the unknown." The breeze lifted his curly hair. "Between death and life."
"Blair, don't talk like that."
Blue eyes met his own. "I guess I just wanted to say good-bye."
"Blair!" Jim half sat up in his cold, bare cabin on the Nebuchadnezzar. He had to rescue Blair. Today, they were going to the Oracle. Naomi had mentioned telling Blair to go to the Oracle. If he had, then maybe he was there. Or, at least, she might know where he had gone.
###
"It's amazing," Jim said. They were riding in a limousine, Morpheus driving, Jim and Neo in the back. The scenery drifted past, people and buildings, the image of mundanity. They were inside the Matrix. It was like the Construct, only... thicker. Like a smothering blanket. Jim could almost see the edges of things, where they were pasted together, like something niggling at the corner of his eye.
"What's amazing? Being back?" Neo asked.
"How real it all seems." Jim touched the plastic siding on the inside of the limousine door. "I feel as if... it's all hollow. More empty than the space inside an atom."
Neo's eyes widened, just a little. "You feel the Matrix? You feel it."
"I thought you did too," Jim said. "Isn't that why you're the One?"
"I see it," Neo said.
"You see it as what?"
"I've never been able to explain what it looks like to me. It just is," Neo said.
"No, it isn't," Jim said. "It seems."
"We're there," Morpheus announced, stopping the car. "Neo, you stay here." They got out, and Morpheus led Jim into a run-down apartment building, with plastic seats in the hall in front of the elevators, and graffiti on the walls. They entered the elevator and Morpheus pressed one of the buttons. Jim refrained from commenting on their surroundings.
"Have you decided yet?" Jim asked.
"Have I decided what?"
"Whether to let us go and rescue Blair."
"I haven't heard a viable plan yet," Morpheus said. "You don't even know where he is, let alone how he is."
"I plan to ask the Oracle."
"I didn't think you believed."
"I don't," Jim said. Oh yeah? And how many dreams and visions have you had, huh? a part of his mind quipped. That's different, he told himself. "She's the last known contact with Blair," Jim said. "She may know where he's gone." It wasn't until he spoke the words that he realized that his hope of finding Blair here had died a silent death. He knew that Blair wasn't here. There was no scent of him in the elevator, not the faintest trace, though there were plenty of other smells. And he doubted very much that Blair would have avoided the elevator, if he had been here. But that was only the logic after the fact. He knew Blair wasn't here.
"You're thinking like a cop," Morpheus said. "That could get you killed."
"Only if I let myself be," Jim said.
The elevator doors dinged open. Morpheus led the way down the dingy hallway and stopped at a door. He gestured at Jim to open the door, but Jim could hear footsteps on the other side, and decided to knock. The door opened before he could do more than raise his fist.
A black woman in a long white dress, her hair caught up in a bundle of many tiny braids, smiled at them. "Welcome, Morpheus, Jim. The Oracle is expecting you. Come in."
They followed her inside. The short hallway had a framed painting and a padded wooden chair. "Morpheus, make yourself at home. Jim, follow me."
She led Jim into what appeared to be a fairly conventional living room, with bookshelves, overstuffed furniture, and a television murmuring in the background. The occupants were anything but conventional. They were all children, of various ages and races, dressed in pale colors, and playing the most unusual... games. A black boy with wildly fuzzy hair was reading a book in Chinese while sitting cross-legged, floating two inches above the floor. A Caucasian boy with a shaved head was playing invisible tug-of-war with an Asian girl. There was no rope, just a handkerchief moving back and forth. Right by his feet was a little girl with long, dark, curly hair, playing mud-pies with the floor.
"Wait here," the black woman said, but Jim hardly heard it, he was so taken with what was going on.
He squatted down by the girl. Her curly locks reminded him painfully of Blair.
She looked up at him and smiled. "Do you want to play?" She scooped up a bit of the floor in her hand as if it were clay, and plopped it onto the pile she was making. "It isn't really there," she said conspiratorially. "I'm just making believe."
No, it isn't really there, is it? Jim put his hand in the floor, and pulled up a sloppy wet bunch of wood and carpet and concrete, and watched it trickle though his hands like sand, a cascade of coloured pixels in this image of a room.
The girl giggled.
Jim smiled.
"The Oracle will see you now," the woman said behind Jim.
Jim suppressed his irritation at the interruption. After all, that was what he was here for. The woman led him to the kitchen, where the smell of baking filled his nose -- something chocolate. A black woman with short curly hair was turning out a cake onto a cooling rack. "Just a moment," she said. The cake was dark brown, with a dusting of flour. There was no underlying charred smell in the room; whatever she was, she wasn't in the habit of burning things; though a tang of nicotine in the air said that she was a smoker.
She turned around and smiled at him. "I'm not what you were expecting, am I?"
"I wasn't expecting anything," Jim said. He hadn't really thought about it. If she could answer the one question he was burning to ask, he didn't really care if she were a snake-oil salesman or had a genuine gift, or was like Charlie Spring, who was a bit of both. He asked. "Did Blair come to see you? Do you know where he is?"
"You don't need me to tell you where Blair is," she answered. "You should listen to your dreams."
"My dreams?" he echoed, not sure whether to dismiss it as New Age crap, or whether to take her seriously. Blair, of course, would have taken her seriously, but he was into that sort of thing.
"Would you feel more inclined to listen if this were a jungle and I was dressed as a shaman?"
What? How did she know? Did Blair--?
"Did Blair tell me about that? No." She stepped right up to him. "Of course, I could be lying, but then, you would be able to tell, wouldn't you?" She offered him her hand, palm upward. "Am I lying?"
He took her hand. It was warm, her pulse steady. "No," he said. "But --"
She shook her head. "No buts," she interrupted. "You have gifts, rare and precious gifts, but you have to trust them." She grasped his hand tightly. Her eyes were pools of sadness. "Blair's life depends on it."
"He's bugged," Jim said.
"Yes," she said. "But you already knew that."
He let go of her hand and clenched his fists by his sides, as if he were trying not to hit something. "I 'know' this, I 'know' that!" he snapped. "But what I don't know is how to save Blair!"
"You can't save Blair," she said.
Jim gaped at her.
Before he could say anything, she continued, "And he can't save himself. Only by both of you working together will Blair have a chance."
"Working together?" Jim said. "How?"
"Your strength is in perception. His is in imagination."
"So?" I already know that. Damn -- is she right? Do I already have the answer?
"You have half the answer," she said. "Blair has the other half."
Jim sighed. "Why must you people always be so damned cryptic?"
She smiled and took his hand. "Because signposts are easier to remember than treatises," she said. "The future is made up of choices; the result of this decision and that decision, piled up on top of each other. You make your own tomorrow by what you choose today. And by what you chose in the past. And by what other people choose. Some things are inevitable, others aren't. I'm just pointing the way. You're the one who has to walk along it."
Any moment now, she's going to ask me what I fear, Jim thought wryly.
"You're a good man, Jim," she said. "Trust yourself. Trust Blair."
"I do trust Blair."
"Good. One last thing." She whispered something that was too low for anyone but a sentinel to hear.
"I don't understand," he said.
"You will," she said. "In time, you will."
###
Morpheus held up his hand to silence Jim. "What she said was for you alone. Don't tell me."
The journey back to the rendezvous point was mostly silent, as Jim cogitated over what the Oracle had said, and thought over his dreams.
When they got out of the car, Jim spoke. "Morpheus," he said. "I have a plan to rescue Blair, but I have to talk to Naomi first."
###
"What do you see?" Naomi asked softly.
Jim sat cross-legged on his bunk, eyes shut, breathing slow and even. "The beach... people... palm trees, the long skinny kind you get in LA and Hawaii. There's a man making a sand-sculpture of a crayfish -- Blair!"
"That's good. Now, don't look at Blair, look around you. What else do you see?"
"Behind the beach, grass, lawns, and smooth paths through the lawns, curving...."
"What else do you see?"
"A boardwalk... stalls, a juggler, music... buildings behind... the beach... mountains in the distance... Blair, Blair is -- no!" Jim opened his eyes with a snap.
"It's okay Jim," Naomi touched his shoulders. "I think I know where it is: Venice Beach. Blair loved it when he was a child, all the people. It's not surprising he might go back there."
"Then that's where I'll go," Jim said.
###
"I'm coming with you," Neo announced as Jim was being strapped into his chair.
"Morpheus didn't mention it," Tank said.
"Last-minute change of plan," Neo said, getting into a chair and not looking at Tank.
Jim looked at Neo sharply, and wondered why he was lying.
"Jim needs someone to watch his back," Neo continued. That wasn't a lie. Jim decided to accept the help in the spirit in which it was offered.
"Set us down as near Venice Beach as you can," Jim said.
Tank consulted his screen, and said, "There's a place just off Strongs Drive."
A moment later, he and Neo stood inside a Los Angeles hotel room, sun streaming in the window, a bare wooden table in the centre of the room, with an old-fashioned dial-telephone on it, ringing.
Neo picked up the handset. "We're in," he said.
They left the room together, went down to the end of the hall and out the fire escape. In the alley outside, they stopped to get their bearings. And don sunglasses.
"Sea's that way." Jim pointed, detecting the smell of salt in the air. As they turned in the direction he'd indicated, he asked, "Why did you defy Morpheus and come with me?"
Neo turned startled eyes on Jim. "You heard our argument, didn't you?"
"Some. It is a trap, you know. I have to do this; you don't. Why are you?"
"Because, once, I had to do something that they all said was impossible. But I knew I could do it. If you say you can do this, you deserve the chance."
"Thanks."
They continued walking shoreward, past parked cars and moving cars, breathing their fumes, past people staring down at the sidewalk, and others strolling and looking around at the buildings and awnings and murals. The street finally ended in an open area, a boardwalk with stalls, cafes, lawns and beach, just as Jim remembered from his dream.
And lots and lots of people.
"How are you going to find him in all this?" Neo asked.
"I'll find him," Jim said. "If I zone out, slap me." He extended his senses -- smell, sight, hearing -- seeking the essence of Blair: his scent, his voice, his self. Somewhere, Blair was there. He knew it.
He lost all track of time, filtering out, seeking, casting out....
"Oh, excuse me!"
It was Blair's voice, above the crowd, above the seagulls and the waves, it was him. Jim piggybacked his sight to his sound, and caught sight of the back of a curly head, farther down the boardwalk, talking to a woman.
"I wasn't looking where I was going. So sorry."
"Found him," Jim muttered to Neo, and strode quickly along the boardwalk, Neo a pace or two behind him. As they got closer, Jim was more and more certain it was really Blair -- his voice, his gestures -- even though Jim couldn't see his face.
"Sandburg!" Jim called out.
The curly head snapped around. Blue eyes widened in recognition, jaw dropped.
Blair turned and ran.
###
