City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams Read Free Book Online

happen much anymore-too many safeguards on the commercial products, too many restrictions and alarm routines on net access at universities and in business."
    Renie waved her hand and the water disappeared. She waved again and a forest of evergreen trees suddenly filled the empty space around them, reddish rippled bark rising in tall columns and a blur of dark leafy greenness high above. !Xabbu's sudden intake of breath gave her a childish satisfaction. "It's all down to input and output," she said. "Just as someone used to sit in front of a flat screen and punch in instructions on a keyboard, now we wave our hands in a certain way and do magic. But it's not magic. It's just input, just telling the processing part of the machinery what to do. And instead of the result appearing on a screen in front of us, we receive the output as stereoscopic visuals-" she indicated the trees, "-sound-" she gestured again; a whisper of birdsong filled the forest, "-and whatever else you want, limited only by the sophistication of your processing machinery and your interface equipment."
    Renie tweaked up a few details, placing a sun in the sky above the filigree of branches, carpeting the forest floor in grass and small white flowers. When she had finished, she spread her hands in a little flourish. "See, you don't even have to do all the work-the machines tidy up the details, angles and length of shadows, all that. This stuff is easy. You've already learned the basics-you'll be doing this yourself in a matter of weeks."
    "The first time I watched my grandfather make a fishing spear," !Xabbu said slowly, "I thought that was magic, too. His fingers moved so fast that I couldn't see what they did, chip here, turn there, twist the cord-then suddenly there it was!"
    "Exactly. The only difference is that if you want to make the best fishing spears in this environment, you have to find someone who'll pay for it. VR equipment starts with the simple stuff everyone has at home-everyone outside the Okavango Swamps, that is-" She wished he could see she was smiling; she hadn't meant the remark to be offensive. "But to get to the top of the line, you have to own a diamond mine or two. Or a small country. But even at a backwater college like this, with our creaky old equipment, I can show you many things."
    "You have shown me many things already, Ms. Sulaweyo. May we make something else now? Might I make something?"
    "Creating in VR environments. . . ." she paused, trying to decide how to explain. "I can show you how to do things, make things-but you wouldn't really be doing the work. Not at this level. You'd just be telling some very sophisticated programs what you wanted and they'd give it to you. That's fine, but you should learn the basics first. It would be as if your grandfather did all but the last stroke of work on the spear and gave you that to do. You wouldn't have made it, and you wouldn't really have learned how to make one of your own."
    "So you are saying that first I need to hunt the right kind of wood, learn how to see and shape the spearhead, how to decide where to put the first chip." He spread his simuloid arms in a comical way. "Yes?"
    She laughed. "Yes. But as long as you realize there's a lot less dramatic work to be done before any of this is useful, I'll show you how to make something."
    Under Renie's patient instruction, !Xabbu rehearsed the hand movements and body positions that commanded the microprocessors. He learned quickly, and she was reminded again of how children learned the net. Most adults, when confronted with a new task, tried to think their way through it, which often took them down blind alleys when their logical models failed to match the new circumstances. But for all his obvious intelligence, !Xabbu took to VR in a far more intuitive way. Instead of setting out to make a particular thing, and then trying to force the machinery to enact his ideas, he let the microprocessors and the software show him what they could