Poor Carlos.
And just what is the Mysterious Stranger promising me?
This had definitely been one of those future-shock days. Robert rolled down the window and felt the breeze sweep by. He was driving north on 1-15. All around was a dense suburbia much like the most built-up parts of twentieth-century California, except that here the houses were a little drabber and the shopping malls were more like warehouse districts. Strangely, there were real malls, even in this brave new world. He had shopped in a couple of them. Some places had plenty of solid architecture. Shopping "for the old at heart" was their motto; that would not have worked in 2000.
Robert pushed away the mysteries (and the fear) and practiced with his Epiphany. Let's see the minimum adornment . Robert shrugged the familiar gesture. Okay so far . He could see simple labeling. Everything, even the ice-plant on the sides of the freeway, had little alphanumeric signs. Another shrug of the shoulder, and he was seeing what the objects he was passing — more accurately, the owners of the objects — wanted him to see. There was advertising. The malls had guessed he was an old fart, and tuned their ads accordingly. But there was none of the outright spam of some earlier sessions. Maybe he finally had his filters set right.
Robert leaned back from the window and reached out to wider universes. Colored maps appeared before his eyes. There were realities that were geographically far away, not overlaid upon San Diego at all. Those must be like the cyberspace crap of the eighties and nineties. Finally he got a window that promised "public local reality only." Yeah. Only two hundred thousand of them for this part of San Diego County. He chose at random. Outside the car, the North County hillsides were swept clean of the subdivisions. The road had only three lanes and the cars were out of the 1960s. He noticed the tag on the windshield of his car (now a Ford Falcon): San Diego Historical Society . Bit by bit, they were reconstructing the past. Big hunks of the twentieth century were available for people who wanted those simpler times.
Robert almost stayed with this view. It was so near his own grad-school years. It was so… comforting. It also occurred to him that these history fans might be allies of the Librareome Project. With Huertas's database in place they could proceed even faster with their reconstructed nostalgia.
He brought up the control window. There was something called "continuous paratime traversal." Or maybe he should pick on a particular writer. There was Jerzy Hacek. No, he'd seen enough of "A Little Knowledge" for today.
How about Terry Pratchett? Okay. The subdivisions were adobe now. His car was an artfully contorted carpet, swooping down a grassy slope that a moment ago had been the grade north of Mountain Meadow Road. In the valley ahead, there were colorful tents with signs painted in a cursive script that made the roman alphabet look vaguely like Arabic calligraphy. There was a scrap of ocean visible in the long, westward-tending valley. And sailing ships?
Robert Gu had read one Pratchett novel. His recollection was that the action mainly took place in a city that resembled medieval London. This was different. He tried to see into the tent city…
Miri — > Lena, Xiu: <sm>I have him again! See?</sm>
Xiu — > Miri, Lena: <sm>Wow. You're driving right next to him? </sm>
Miri –> Lena, Xiu: <sm>No, this is cobbled together from the hills, and various car cams.</sm>
Xiu — > Miri, Lena: <sm>He just seems to be looking around.</sm>
Miri — > Lena, Xiu: <sm>I have a lock on Sharif's persona. We've got Robert all to ourselves.</sm>
Lena — > Miri, Xiu: <sm>This is ridiculous.</sm>
Miri –> Lena, Xiu: <sm>Okay, so now I'm Sharif, sitting right beside Robert… oh darn!</sm>
Someone gave a polite cough. Robert twisted around.
It was Sharif, sitting on the far end of the passenger seat. "Didn't mean to surprise you, Professor." The vision smiled ingratiatingly. "I tried to reappear earlier, but there were technical difficulties."
"That's fine," said Robert, wondering vaguely if Tommie was still interfering.
Sharif waved at the landscape around them. "So what do you think?"
It was the land of San Diego with a little more water. And a different people, a different civilization. "I thought I was dialing into one of the Terry Pratchett stories."
Sharif gave a shrug. "You got the main Pratchett belief circle all right. At least for San Diego."
"Yes, but — " Robert waved at the grasslands. "Where's Ankh-Morpork? Where are the slums and the dives and the city guard?"
Sharif smiled. "Mainly in London and Beijing, Professor. It's best to fit one's fantasy to follow something like the underlying geography. Pratchett writes of a whole world. This here, is what fits San Diego." Sharif stared for a moment. "Yes, this is Abu Dajeeb. You know, the sultanate he put just south of Sumarbad in The Fiery Crow ."
"Oh." The Fiery Crow ? "Written after you lost, ah — "
After I lost my marbles, yeah . "It's, it's immense. I can imagine someone writing about such a place, but no one man or even a movie company could put together all the — " Robert shrank back from the window as a woman on a winged iguana flew by. (He slipped into the real view, saw a Highway Patrol cruiser speeding past.)
Sharif chuckled. "It's not the work of one man. There's probably a million fans who've contributed to this. Like a lot of the best realities, it was also a commercial effort, the most successful external cinema of 2019. In the years since, it has just gotten better and better, an act of love on the part of the fans."
"Hmm." Robert had always resented the millions that went into the film industry, and the writers who got rich from it. "I'll bet Pratchett made a pretty penny out of this stuff."
Sharif gave a smirk. "More than Hacek. Not as much as Rowling. But the microroyalties add up. Pratchett owns a rather large part of Scotland."
Robert shifted away from the Pratchett imagery. There were others: Tolkien views, and things he couldn't recognize even from their labels. What was SCA? Oh. In the SCA vision, the suburbs were transformed into villages behind walls, and there were castles atop the higher hills. The county parklands looked fierce and forested.
Sharif seemed to be following his imagery. He jerked a thumb at the Los Pumas Valley park just sliding by on the right. "You should see the Ren-Faires. They grab the whole park, sometimes run pretend wars between the barons of the hilltops. It's excellent, my man, truly excellent."
Ah . Robert turned and took a close look at Sharif. The match to his earlier appearance was perfect, except for the smartass grin on his face. "And you're not Sharif."
The grin broadened. "I was wondering if you'd ever catch on. You really must learn to be more paranoid about identity, Professor. I know, you've met Zulfi Sharif in person. That is the graduate student you think it is, and just the groveler he seems. But he doesn't have good control. I can show up as Sharif whenever I please."
"That's not what you said a few minutes ago."
Sharif frowned. "That was different. You've got other fans. One of them is not fully incompetent."
Huh ? Robert thought a second, then forced a smile. "Then perhaps you'd better have some password so I don't blurt all your secrets to the wrong Sharif, eh?"
The Mysterious Stranger didn't look amused. "Very well… When I first say 'my man,' that will trigger a certificate exchange. You don't have to do a thing." Now Sharif's face had a faint greenish tinge, and his eyes had a slant that had nothing to do with epicanthic eyefolds. He smiled. "You'll see your djinni and know it's really me. So what did you think of Tommie Parker's plan?"