This was true. They all wandered about looking very dejected, as if the world were pressing heavily on their shoulders. I had tried to catch the eye of one or two, but they’d steadfastly ignore me and, it seemed, everyone else. I knew about “ghosts” but always thought they were a fictional construct, like some of the odder facets of Japanese culture. However, Square was uninterested in my transparent people and wanted to carry on with my education.
“If you can manage crowd work, you can handle almost anything,” said Square. “You know about flocks of starlings and schools of fish, how they all seem to move at the same time?”
I told him that I had heard of this but not witnessed it.
“Humans are exactly the same when they get into crowds. By using subtle sensory cues and working to a set of basic rules, you can enter a crowd full of people all heading in different directions and come out the other side without touching anyone or causing an accident.”
“How?” I said, looking suspiciously at the swirling mass of humanity.
“Think of it as a subtle dance, where you have to avoid touching anyone. You have to jog and dodge your way around but also have to know when people are going to dodge and jink round you. Give it a whirl.”
I stepped into the crowd, and almost immediately a woman stopped dead in front of me.
“Sorry,” I said, and walked on. I could sense I was disrupting the smooth liquidity of the crowd, and based on the noises people were making, it wasn’t appreciated. I got to the other side of the street without bumping into anyone, but only just.
“Not so easy, is it?” said Square, and I had to admit he was right. I had thought being in the RealWorld would be simple, or at least a lot like home, but it wasn’t. Nothing here was assumed; everything had to be actually done, and witnessed. Weirder still, once something was done, it was gone, and the knowledge of it faded almost immediately into memory. Once or twice I found myself attem
pting to move backwards or forwards in time before realizing that that’s not how it worked. If I wanted to be five minutes in the future, I had to laboriously run the five minutes in real time, and if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. It was how I imagined the narrator in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu spent most of his life—trapped in a noisy, brightly colored cage barely two or three seconds wide.
After twenty minutes I could walk through the crowd without too much difficulty, but once or twice I found myself in the situation where the people I was trying to avoid met me head on, and I moved left, and they did, so I moved right, and they did, too, and so on, for up to five times, which elicited nothing more than a chuckle from my dancing partner.
“The old ‘back and forth’ happens a lot when real and fictional people meet,” said Square when I’d returned to where he was waiting for me. “If the Outlanders had any idea we were amongst them, it would be the surest way to tell. That and a certain confusion when it comes to everyday tasks. If you see someone unable to boil a kettle, open a sash window or understand he has an appalling haircut, it probably means he’s fictional.”
“Hmm,” I said, “why is that woman in the annoyingly flamboyant clothes staring at me?”
“Probably because she recognizes you.”
“Don’t I have to know who she is before she can recognize me?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Thursday?” said the woman, bounding up to me with a huge grin and a clatter of beads. “Is that really you? Where have you been hiding these past few months?”
I recognized her from the vague approximation that had made it through to my series. It was Cordelia Flakk, ex-SpecOps publicity guru and now . . . well, I had no idea what she did.
“Hello, Cordelia.”
“How are Landen and the kids?”
“Apparently they’re very well.”
“Did you hear about Hermione? Went to the slammer for trying to fiddle her taxes and then tried to escape. She was caught between the wire with two saber-toothed tigers. They didn’t know what had happened to her until a bangle and parts of her synthetic kidney turned up in one of the sabers’ . . . well, I don’t want the story to get too gruesome.”
“Too late.”
“You old wag, you! Will you be coming to Penelope’s for the Daphne Farquitt reading party Friday afternoon? She wants us all to come round to her place for the readathon, and she’s dying to show off her new man.” She leaned closer. “A neanderthal, you know. Frightfully polite, of course, but likes to sleep in the garden shed. She has a few stories about matters south, I should warrant—a few glasses and she’ll spill the beans, if you know what I mean.”
The woman laughed.
“Goodness, is that the time? How I prattle so!” She suddenly lowered her voice. “By the way, are you still dealing in cheese?”
“Not really—”
“A pound of Limburger would set us straight. Just a taster, then—anything, in fact. I mean, it’s not like we’re asking for any X-14. Oh. Sorry, is that still a sore point? Why not bring a taster of cheese to Penelope’s do on Friday? We can enhance them with some pineapple chunks. Cheese and Farquitt! Naughty us! Ta-ra!”
And she tossed her head and moved off.
“Did you understand any of that?” asked Square.