Undercity Read Online Free PDF

find out a lot about people from the way they reacted when they were irritated.
    Unfortunately, so far I hadn’t found out squat.
    * * *
    “Lumos down to five percent,” I said.
    The lights in my suite dimmed until I could barely see the console that curved around my chair. I leaned back, my hands clasped behind my head, and put my feet on the console. “Jan, show me the landscapes that Prince Dayjarind collected.”
    “Accessed.” Jan’s androgynous voice came from the Evolving Intelligence brain, or EI, that ran the console. A holo appeared above the console, a startling scene in three dimensions. Waves rose impossibly high over a sapphire beach and crashed down on the glittering blue sand, spraying phosphorescent foam. The physics made no sense. Unless it was an unusually low-gravity world, those waves went up far too high and came down far too slowly. When they built to their highest point, they looked like tidal waves. The ocean should have receded far back from the beach as each wave pulled up all the water, but it didn’t. None of that mattered, though. Artistically, the scene was breathtaking.
    “What planet is that on?” I asked.
    “It isn’t,” Jan said.
    “Is it pure fiction?” I asked. “Or does it resemble a known place?”
    After a pause, Jan said, “The scene has a nine percent correlation to the Urban Sea on the planet Metropoli.”
    Nine percent didn’t say much, but it wasn’t negligible. “Show me another one he liked.”
    Over the next hour, Jan showed me Dayj’s collection of oceans, beaches, and mountains, a valley of opal hills, a plain of red reeds under a cobalt sky, a forest of stained-glass trees. At first I didn’t see any correlation between them, other than their eerie beauty. Then it hit me.
    They were all empty.
    “Do any of his landscapes have people in them?” I asked.
    Another pause. Then Jan said, “None.”
    I exhaled, saddened.
    * * *
    Vaj Majda spoke coldly. “Offending my family and staff achieves nothing, Major Bhaajan.”
    One day at the palace and already I had insulted people. Apparently neither Takkar nor Prince Paolo liked my attitude.
    We were standing before a window in the library, bathed in sunlight. “The whole point of bringing me in,” I said, “was to get new insights, to see if I can find what others missed.”
    She considered me, one of the few people I knew who was tall enough to look down at me, not by much, but it was still unsettling.
    “And have you found anything?” she asked.
    “I ran correlations on Dayj’s landscapes with real places.”
    The general waved her hand in dismissal. “So did Takkar’s people.”
    “True. But I searched for negatives.”
    “Negative in what sense?”
    “I looked for what was missing.”
    “And?”
    “He doesn’t like the desert. No images at all.”
    Majda tilted her head, her face thoughtful. “He lives on the edge of a desert. It might seem harsh or mundane to him.”
    I’d wondered the same. “He likes the ocean.”
    She smiled with unexpected grace. “Perhaps he dreams of the age when the Vanished Sea stretched here to the horizon and sent waves crashing into the shore.”
    Interesting. A bit of a poet lived in the conservative general. I struggled to express an idea that was more intuition than analysis. “You say he’s a dreamer. He likes to read stories. He enjoys exotic landscapes that exist only in the mind of an artist. All places. No people.”
    “I’m not sure I follow your meaning.”
    “He’s lonely.”
    She frowned. “That is the best you can do? His holos have no people, therefore he is lonely?”
    “Doesn’t it bother you?”
    “I hired you to find him. Not give him therapy.”
    I spoke carefully. “Your Highness, if I offend, I ask your pardon. But to find him, I have to explore all possibilities. Maybe your nephew dreamed of places rather than people because he saw his life as empty. Without companionship. Actual places are no more real to him than the