"How do you know about . . . about her?"
"Who's asking the questions, boy?" She glared at him. Orlando felt certain she could crack a walnut between those eyebrows if she wanted to. "Not only do I know about her, my husband Terence died in Osiris' dungeons to protect her secrets, and eight more of my friends have died here, too. So you can understand I'm a little bit short-tempered about the whole thing. Now you better talk to me."
Orlando took a breath. Self-preservation screamed at him not even to think about asking another question, but he had been under sentence of death too long to be easily cowed. "Just tell me who your friends are, please. Why are you here?"
Bonita Mae Simpkins also took a breath. "I'm praying for patience, boy." She closed her eyes as though it were the literal truth. "We are the Circle, young man, and we are going to send every one of these sinners and false gods down to hell on the express elevator. Now, s'pose you start talking."
CHAPTER 4
A Problem With Geography
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: IEN, Hr. 4 (Eu, NAm)—"BACKSTAB"
(visual: Kennedy wrestling with crocodile)
VO: Stabbak (Caroius Kennedy) and Shi Na (Wendy Yohira) must make their way to the Amazon rain forest in pursuit of a chemical coveted by the evil Doctor Methuselah (Moishe Reiner). 5 principal Yanomamo aboriginals needed, plus extras. Flak to; IEN.BKSTB.CAST
"No, that feels quite ordinary." Florimel opened her eyes. "Everything feels just as it does in real life. Sharp feels sharp, soft feels soft, hot feels hot, even when the fire is artificial. In fact, it is becoming a bit uncomfortable."
"Sorry." Renie moved the smoldering stick away from Florimel's bare shin. She tested it near her own hand; the heat did indeed feel quite realistic. "So even in this place, we're still getting almost perfect simulation."
"But we still do not know the whys and wherefores," said Martine, frowning. "We have quite different equipment, all of us. Renie, you and !Xabbu do not even have telematic implants. But we are all getting input that seems equally sophisticated."
"Not at first," Renie remembered. "!Xabbu used to say that his sense of smell was disappointingly limited, that he thought it was because they hadn't built much into the military VR system we were using. But I haven't heard him complain about it lately. Maybe he's just gotten used to it."
Martine seemed about to say something, but instead an odd expression crossed her face, what Renie thought of as her satellite-tracking look, as though information was being beamed to her from the black distances of space.
"There he is," said Florimel, climbing to her feet. "We can ask him."
Renie turned to see !Xabbu's familiar shape poised on the brow of a nearby hill, as though he had stopped to watch them. "They're back quickly. I wonder where Emily and T4b are."
"Fighting," said Florimel dryly. "Hitting each other with their school bags, perhaps. It is hard to tell sometimes if they are worst enemies or teenage lovers."
"Well, if Emily is looking for a stepfather for her baby, the choices are pretty limited in this group." She squinted. "Why is !Xabbu just standing there like that?" A breath of chill hurried through her, and she raised her arm to wave at the unmoving monkey shape. "!Xabbu?"
"It is not him," said Martine in an odd, choked voice.
"What?"
"It is not him." Martine was also squinting, her sightless eyes squeezed shut like someone suffering a bad headache. "I cannot tell who or what it is you are seeing, but I can tell you it is not !Xabbu."
Even as Renie scrambled to her feet, the baboon on the hill made a slight movement—whether backward or to the side was hard to tell—and was gone.
The spot where he had stood was quite empty, the unfinished land open and uninhabited around them as far as they could see, a rumpled crazy quilt with no folds or prominences substantial enough to hide anything.
"Where did he go?" Renie wondered. "There's nowhere to disappear to."
"Unless like the thing T4b and I saw the other day," Florimel suggested, "it merely stepped through the air and vanished."
"But what was it, then? What did you think it was, Martine?"
"I am sorry not to be more useful," the French woman said, "but I cannot guess. I know only that its pattern was not !Xabbu's. What I 'see' is too hard to describe. But I can tell you that it seemed both more complicated and less complicated than one of us."
"Was it like those ghost-children you described?" Renie asked. "One of those?"
"No. Those felt like people, whatever they were in fact. This seemed like an opening into something else, as though the thing you saw as !Xabbu were a kind of glove-puppet, and I was sensing the hand underneath."
Florimel made a harsh noise. "I cannot say I like the sound of that. Something from the Grail Brotherhood, come looking for us? Perhaps even the false Quan Li, come back again in a different shape?"
Martine shook her head, rubbing at her eyes as if she had tired herself out staring at something. "I think not. Perhaps it was just a strange quirk of this environment. A reflection, perhaps—a sort of echo of the real !Xabbu."
Renie suddenly needed to share the eerie thought that had gripped her. "Maybe it's something this . . . this place is doing. Watching us, analyzing us, making copies of us."
"Double-goers," said Florimel, pondering. "No, that is not right. Double-goers. Double-goers."
Renie was confused. "What do you mean?"
"I think you know the German word, but the software forces a translation."
"I can say it," Martine said with a small smile, "because I am speaking English. There is a paradox for you, no? The word Florimel is saying is 'doppelgangers.' "
Renie nodded. "I've heard it, yes. But I don't like the idea." She shivered and looked around. "I know we already took a vote, and I'm not trying to reverse the outcome, but I never liked this place much and I feel even more that way now." What she didn't say, and perhaps didn't need to say now that her companions had come to know her, was that she was feeling intensely the pressure to do something—the need was thumping in her like a drumbeat.
"We know, Renie," said Martine kindly. "But we cannot do anything until the others return, in any case."
Renie started to say something, then had a sudden, vivid recollection of a ghost story she had been told by her grandmother in which the spirit of someone who was dying appeared at that same moment to his loved ones far away. For a moment her terror was so great she could not speak.
She felt such powerful relief when !Xabbu and the others eventually came trooping back that she could only give the man in the baboon sim a hug, then reach out to touch him from time to time as he and the others made their report.
". . . The truth," he said, "is that we have found nothing in any of four directions we have tried, except for some small strangenesses, like the animal T4b and Florimel saw yesterday, and a few things I myself have discovered."
"Monkey-man tripped on some air," explained T4b, vastly entertained.
"That is not what happened," said !Xabbu, his dignity perhaps a bit bruised. "What I found is that just as there are places where the land does not feel right, or where we can reach through things that seem to be before us, there are also places where the air has grown solid. At least, it is thicker than air should be, as though it were . . . I cannot find a word. As though it were . . . becoming something."
"What does that mean?" Renie was so relieved !Xabbu and the others had returned safely that she was finding it difficult to concentrate.
"Some of this place is invisible to us, and some of it that we should be able to touch, we cannot touch." He lifted his hands to show he had no better answer.
"We cannot completely trust our senses, that seems to be the lesson," said Florimel briskly. "That has been true all over the network, although in different ways."
"But it's not the same here, and you know it." Renie found Florimel easier to like after her confession, but there was still something in the woman's manner that occasionally rubbed her wr
ong. "We had an experience here that you should know about, !Xabbu." She quickly told him of the phantom baboon. He seemed more disturbed by it than she had expected, which made her remember her own fears.
"So you saw something with my shape," he said, nodding slowly. "But it would not speak to you."
"Speak? It didn't even move until just before it vanished." She didn't like his morose expression. Had she tripped him up with something that recalled one of his grimmer beliefs? "Martine thinks it might be a reflection of a sort."
"Like an echo, or a mirage," the blind woman said. "Perhaps a mirage is the better metaphor, because of the way it bends light."
"Perhaps." The man in the monkey sim was subdued.
"Maybe it's something like what happened to us on the boat with Azador," Renie said suddenly. "That disruption when everything seemed to be falling apart, going strange." That didn't really explain anything, she realized, just stated another instance of their ignorance.
"It isn't more monkeys, is it?" asked Emily, clearly apprehensive. The reference to Azador had caught her attention. "Maybe Lion sent more monkeys to get us."
Renie bit back a sharp reply. She very much doubted it had anything to do with New Emerald City, which was the only simulation Emily knew, but her idea wasn't any more farfetched than anyone else's.
This is truly like being in a children's story, she thought unhappily. There doesn't seem to be any logic to it, no rules—literally anything could be true. How are we supposed to accomplish something under these conditions?
It was another question—she was building quite a stack of them—without an answer.
"Code Delphi. Start here.
"This is Martine Desroubins, resuming my journal. Considering how much more leisure we have had since entering what Renie refers to as "The Backwater' or 'Patchwork Land' it would seem I might have been more frequent in my entries, but other than the summation of two days ago, describing the events of our coming through to rejoin Renie and !Xabbu, things have been too hectic.
"We can make no sense of this place. The mysteries grow deeper with every day. Not only is the environment all but empty of anything resembling animal life, and very sparsely vegetated, the entire landscape seems to be undergoing processes of random change that have little to do with imitating real geography. Other than a general separation of ground and air, which mostly stay in their respective places, the flux is constant. In fact, I have ceased asking my companions to explain what they see, since it is so often different than what my senses tell me. They are living in an unstable but more or less comprehensible arrangement of hills and valleys, with things that resemble trees and boulders and other natural objects scattered about the landscape. For me, it often seems that my companions and I are in a place where the edges are always in transition—the ground swirls upward in plumes that they cannot see, the air is so thick in places that I would assume it blocks the light, except that they say it does not, and in any case, the light comes from every direction and no direction.
"Still, I cannot say it is upsetting to me—I do not feel panic, as I did so strongly in those final hours in the Place of the Lost. The changes are slow, and feel as though they are in keeping with the environment. I am learning to read the information that comes to me so that I am no more discommoded than the others.
"There are reasons for concern, however. Earlier today, Renie and Florimel saw what they thought was !Xabbu watching us from a distance. I saw nothing like the Bushman's 'shape'—what I think of as his insignia—but rather a strange, complex apparition that seemed oddly larger than the amount of virtual territory it displaced. My senses are still new, and I cannot describe it more clearly than that. Later, as we were all going to sleep beside the fire, T4b saw something he thought was Emily, some distance from our camp. Worried for her, he went toward it without noticing that the real Emily was sleeping only a few meters away on the far side of Florimel. The false Emily disappeared before our youngest companion reached it.
"What does all this mean? And how do this simulation and these phenomena relate to the bizarre dislocations where the entire network system seems to break down? I have no idea. In a way, though, it is perhaps a good thing we are in such an unusual spot. It minimizes our differences at a time when we are all tired, frightened, and short-tempered, and when there is genuine disagreement between us. Losing Orlando and Fredericks has been difficult enough, but although the hope is small, as long as they are merely missing there is always a chance we may see them again. But watching William die and discovering that Quan Li was not who she seemed have been terrible blows.
"Oddly, the changes in Renie have not been what I would have expected. She has always been volatile, and I would have guessed that our complete and utter failure so far to solve any of Otherland's riddles would have pushed her farther into anger and impatience. Instead she seems to have found a well of strength within herself, and has taken losing a vote on what we should do with good grace—even more surprising considering that the deciding vote cast against her came from her friend, !Xabbu.
"Something in her experiences has . . . I cannot think of the proper word. Broadened her? Deepened her, perhaps. She has always been a young woman of poise and sharp wits and courage, but with a certain brittleness as well. Now, although she is not by any means completely changed, she seems calmer in her spirit. Perhaps this is !Xabbu's influence. It would be tempting to suggest that as the representative of a simpler, more ancient way of life he has changed her with his simple, ancient wisdom, but that would be to grossly underestimate the man. His wisdom, what I have seen of it, is never simple, and although some of it comes from the thousand generations of his people's past, much of it has also come from being an intelligent young man raised on the extreme fringes of what the world calls 'civilization'—that is, knowing all his life that most of what the world considers important has nothing to do with him at all.
"In fact, I think !Xabbu by far walks the most difficult path of all of us, trying to reconcile a culture whose ways have been tested and settled a hundred centuries ago with a world of technological change that is almost cancerous in its constant growth and evolution. This place we are staying could be a metaphor for how what !Xabbu terms our 'city-world' must feel to him.
"He has had another effect on Renie as well, although I do not know whether she is entirely aware of it. I cannot tell whether he is in love with her—one of the things I undoubtedly miss because of my blindness is the way someone looks at someone else—but there is no question he is devoted to her. Neither can I tell for certain whether she loves him, but she is a different person when he is absent—much of what I perceive as her newfound inner peace is undercut. At times, hearing them speak of each other in the language of cheerful but casual companionship, I want to grab one of them—usually Renie—and give that person a shake. But must they not discover whatever is there in their own time? In any case, the differences between them are very great, so perhaps I am half-hoping for something that might turn out to be a tragic mistake. Nevertheless, there are certainly moments I wish for a fairy godmother's wand. I think if I had one, I would make a magical mirror, so both could see themselves as the other sees them.
"And what of me, in all this? As usual, I speak of others, think of others, observe or consider or—occasionally—manipulate others. Always I am outside. What does a fairy godmother do when she is not blessing babies or magicking up a coach and dress for Cinderella? Does she perhaps sit outside the ring of the campfire, watching over the others as they sleep, talking quietly to herself?
"If so, then it seems I am a natural.
"Someone is stirring, I hear. It is T4b, which means my time at the sentry post seems to have come to an end already. I will continue this soon, I hope. . . .
"Code Delphi. End here. "
The shriek was clearly human, yet so strangely pitched that for the first instant of sudden consciousness Renie wanted nothing to do with it. As she sat up, bleary with sleep, the confusion of dr
eam still clinging to her, she found herself wishing against all good sense that she had not heard it, that she could just drop away back into unconsciousness and let someone else deal with it.
After her eyes popped open, it took a long moment before she realized that something else was wrong, too.
"It's dark!" she shouted. "How did that happen? Where's the light?"
"Renie! There is a big hole here!" one of the others called. "Somebody fell in!"
She rolled onto her side and saw by the dim firelight that a huge black space now stretched on the far side of the fire, where previously there had been ground. "Who is it?"
"Martine!" Florimel said hoarsely. "I can't see her, but I can hear her!"
T4b was shouting, too, ragged cries in which Renie could make out no words. "Jesus Mercy," she snapped at him as she scrambled toward the edge of the hole, "that's not helping any!" Despite the sudden and unprecedented arrival of night, she thought she could see something moving in the depths, faint shadows of red and black: the weird transparency of the soil was allowing through a smear of firelight. "Martine?" she called. "Can you hear me?"
"I am here, Renie." The blind woman's voice was tightly controlled. "I am clinging, but the dirt is very loose. I am afraid to move."
Renie saw Florimel on the far side of the broad pit, but she knew more than the two of them would be needed. "Help us, !Xabbu, T4b!" Renie said. "She can't hang on long."
"My hand!" T4b sounded quite stunned, almost drugged.
Renie had no idea what he was talking about, but !Xabbu was now standing beside her. "Lower me in," he said. "I will hold her as we pull her out."
Florimel, a little wild-eyed, shook her head emphatically. "You are not strong enough!"
"I am strong," !Xabbu said. "Only my body is small."
Renie did not want to waste time arguing. She was inclined to trust !Xabbu, although the idea of lowering him into the dark was frightening. "If he says so, it's true. Come over here and help me, Florimel. T4b, are you going to help or not?"