“What have you done?” Geller cried in panic. “Pikul, if that doesn’t stop, I’m going to bleed to death!”
He looked around frantically, desperate to find something with which to stanch the flow, but in the poorly lit and squalid stable there was nothing suitable. In desperation he stamped his foot down on Geller’s end of the cord. The main flow of blood stopped immediately, although some continued to leak out slowly around his foot.
Geller moaned in despair and misery.
“I’m sorry, Geller,” Pikul said. “I didn’t know what else to do!”
A man’s voice said, “I do.”
Pikul whirled around, managing to maintain his foot’s pressure on the end of the cord. It was Yevgeny Nourish who had spoken. He’d entered the stall while they were preoccupied.
“I know exactly what to do,” Nourish said with horrible menace.
Nourish was in the process of taking a large propane torch from a hook on the wall. He slipped the straps over his shoulder and unscrewed the gas valve. A fierce hissing immediately followed.
“For God’s sake!” Geller cried, her eyes frantic. “What are you doing?”
Nourish ignited the torch, and a long blue-white flame stabbed out, roaring a deadly heat into the confined space of the stall.
“Death to Realism!” Nourish shouted.
He turned the cone of flame on the death-pod in the basket, standing over it with an expression of appalling relish on his face. The pod reacted at once to the blast of heat: it shriveled and crackled, and bubbles of what looked like boiling fat erupted on its diseased surface. A smell of burning flesh, human or animal, pervaded the stall, a disgusting stench of decay and death.
The pod was trying to save itself, rippling away from the deadly flame like a trapped centipede. Wherever the flame played, the pod’s dying body hunched away defensively.
Nourish laughed maniacally, and began to play the flame over the entire surface of the pod, deliberately picking out those parts that were arching away from him.
Geller sank to the ground in a state of apparent shock, holding on to Pikul’s leg for support.
Now the stricken pod was starting to swell under the terrible jetting inferno. Immense bubbles kept erupting up to its surface, to burst with gaseous explosions as the flame hit them. Inside the pod, more frightening changes could be seen taking place: a broiling dark gas was swirling about angrily under the transparent integument of the pod, flecked with bright red points. The entire pod was swelling, growing, starting to bulge . . .
It exploded without warning, scattering charred pieces of burned flesh in all directions.
A bulging, bellowing cloud of gas burst forth, a solid jet of dark smoke, black and gray, oily and viscous, and belching out of the shattered, melted remains of the pod with a force that seemed impossible for the size of the thing.
Nourish staggered backward in reaction to the volcano of black smoke, the propane flame flashing dangerously around the small space like the glittering blade of a razor-sharp sword. Pikul ducked away as the flame arced by him, and Geller clung more tightly to his leg.
The black smoke appeared to have a life of its own. Instead of filling and choking the air of the stall, it shot upward in a steady jet then spread sideways along the roof above the adjacent stalls, heading toward the main area of the Trout Farm’s assembly line.
As it spread out it cooled. A gritty ash, rather like tiny grains of coal, began to settle on all the areas below.
Nourish clearly had had no idea this was going to happen, because he watched the progress of the vile cloud with a horrified expression. The propane jet flared down, threateningly close to the dung-stiff straw that lay everywhere on the floor of the stall.
Gathering up her last shreds of energy, Geller rose to a kneeling position. She drew back from Pikul. He turned to help her but to his amazement saw that she was about to pounce on him. She dived hard, shouldering him aside so that his foot came away from the end of the sliced-apart UmbyCord. Blood pulsed anew from the open end.
As Pikul staggered away, off balance, Geller grabbed the linoleum knife from his inert hand.
Trailing her bloody cord, she lunged at Nourish, driving the blood-smeared blade deep into his back, twisting it, hacking downward for maximum effect.
Nourish screamed with pain, drooped forward, managed to recover his poise, then turned in her direction. She stood in shock, paralyzed by his response.
He raised the propane torch toward her face and staggered menacingly forward. The flame waved from side to side in a deadly arc.
“Death!” he croaked. “Death to the demoness . . . death to Barb Brecken . . . death to the game—”
Pikul said, stupidly, “Death to who?” He saw Geller’s ID card swinging between her breasts. “Oh yeah . . . Barb . . .”
Nourish’s eyeballs rolled upward in a final dying spasm, and he croaked his last. He slumped forward into the brown-smeared straw, the propane torch jetting its flame into the tinder-dry material.
A ball of flame exploded up around him, mixing with the jet of black smoke that continued to belch out of the pod.
Pikul leaped through the sheet of flame that had erupted between him and Geller. Her cord was still trailing, still pulsing blood everywhere. In desperation, he grabbed it. He twisted it fiercely in his hands, strangling it. After a few more spurts, the blood was finally stanched.
In the few seconds that this took, the fire had spread throughout most of the stall. The straw was now ablaze in many places, and the flames were already shooting up the wooden walls. The doorway was a rectangle of white liquid fire, roaring fiercely with backdraft as the air from outside rushed into the vacuum in the stall created by the inferno.
Both he and Geller were starting to choke, and tears were streaming from their eyes.
Outside, above the terrible sounds of the conflagration, they could hear the rest of the assembly plant reacting to the emergency. Several sirens started howling together. A voice on the loudspeaker system began uttering a series of evacuation orders. A bell was ringing insistently and deafeningly. People were screaming and shouting and Pikul could hear a huge crowd of them running unseen down the passage outside the stalls. Such fear was infectious: Pikul felt a pandemonium of panic in his mind, a quest to run, escape, hide.
Meanwhile, the flames were racing across the straw on which they stood, licking up at them. The smoke made it almost impossible to breathe.
Pikul held Geller tightly in his arms. She was limp, drained, at the end of everything. He wondered if she were still even capable of knowing he was there with her.
As the flames engulfed them, Pikul said softly, “I think we just lost the game, Geller.”
But as terminal darkness spread around them, strange and inexplicable shapes could be glimpsed through the flames: a chair, a bed, a bathtub, a table.
The guest chalet was morphing into form around them.
“Or maybe not,” Pikul said softly to her.
[ 23 ]
They were together on the bed in the chalet. Allegra Geller was in his arms. The room was gently lit by low-power lamps, and the quiet darkness of the valley night was soft against the windows. As reality swam into being, Pikul cherished these few moments of peace. The deadly inferno of the Trout Farm was behind them, the unknown lay ahead, but at least for the moment he had Allegra Geller safe in his arms and they were alone on a bed.
As the shape of the guest chalet morphed up around them, he began to feel increasingly concerned about Allegra’s well-being. Although she was breathing steadily and seemed at peace, she showed no signs of emerging from the physical and mental collapse that had followed the violence in the pod-assembly stall. Maybe she was suffering after-effects, or a kind of shock . . .
Even so, he loved the feel of her body in his arms. He bent his face tenderly toward hers.
She stirred at last, so he laid his fingers on her cheek.
“Allegra?”
She groaned lightly.
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“Allegra, we’re back home. At the ski club. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she said indistinctly.
“Is anything wrong?”
“I always get a kick out of returning from a game. Sometimes I experience a little extra and then I like to take my time. The extra now is that you’re here with me. I like you holding me.”
She opened her eyes and looked dreamily up at him, but almost immediately a harsh comprehension entered her eyes.
“Pikul, it’s here with us!” she said with obvious alarm. She sat up and swiveled around to face him directly. “It’s happened,” she said. “It came back with us. We must have brought it back with us when we came out of eXistenZ.”
“We brought what back?” Pikul said obtusely. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“We brought the disease back with us! My game-pod is infected.”
She was now frilly alert.
As if realizing for the first time the implications of what she was saying, Allegra leaped up from the bed and stood before him. She reached behind her, trying to pull at the UmbyCord, still connected not only to the game-pod on the bed but also to her spine.
“My God, I’m really going to lose it this time! I’m going to lose my game! Unport me, Pikul! Come on, get the damned thing out of me!”
Pikul swiftly unported her—now that they were back in reality, there were no problems in removing the Cord from the bioport—and she danced away from him in evident relief. She turned and bent over the game-pod, which remained on the bed, close to where they’d been lying together so intimately.
Pikul reached behind him and tried to get the UmbyCord out of his own bioport, but it was held stiffly in place. He walked crabwise the short distance across to a wall mirror and contorted himself to see better. Although the Cord was still tightly implanted in him, there did not appear to be any abnormal swelling or discoloration around the bioport.
Just the completely normal swelling and discoloration, he thought.
Geller had moved to her shoulder bag. She searched around inside it and after a moment pulled out a tiny hypodermic needle sealed inside a sterile pack.
She unwrapped the needle quickly, plucked off the polythene stopper that protected the point, then held the syringe up to the light and flicked any bubbles out of the liquid. She squirted a microspray into the air.
Kneeling beside the bed, she put her free hand on the game-pod.
“I’m here,” she said softly to the game-pod, as if it were a sick child. “I’m here with you.”
She thrust the needle into the side of the pod. As she pushed in the plunger she massaged the rest of the pod with her free hand, using a series of sensual strokes that looked to Pikul as if she was starting to make love to it. He almost expected her to press her open lips to it and give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
While he continued to struggle with his own end of the UmbyCord, careful not to pull at it so hard that he dislodged the game-pod from the bed, Pikul realized the full significance of what Geller had said.
“Did you say we’ve brought the disease back?” he asked. “I mean . . . in one sense it doesn’t surprise me, because that was such a horrible experience. But surely that would be impossible? We were in a game. It wasn’t reality. How can a game event have any effect on real life?”
Geller glanced back at him while she continued to massage the pod.
“There’s obviously some kind of weird reality bleed-through going on here,” she said. “I’m not sure I get it.”
Pikul’s bioport suddenly released the jack of the UmbyCord, which came out with an audible popping sound.
“What’s in that syringe you’re using?” Pikul asked.
“It’s a broad-spectrum sporicide. I’m not sure what the hell it was I picked up in the assembly bay, but all game-pods are congenitally susceptible to spores, pollen, and airborne fungi. Clinically, the RNA of spore infection is usually one of a range of known sequences, and so what I’ve jabbed in will probably help. The main thing is to get to it in time.”
While she was speaking, Pikul had been scratching unconsciously at his bioport. Geller noticed this and fixed him with an intense look.
“You got an itch?” she said.
“Sorry. Am I irritating you?”
“No. Let me see your bioport.”
“What?”
“Let me see it, Pikul!”
Reluctantly, Pikul turned his back toward her. She examined it so closely he could feel the light, passing pressure of her breath on his skin.
“I think I’ve figured out what must have happened,” she said in a low and dismal voice. “It must have been Kiri Vinokur. I can’t believe he would do such a thing. That bastard.”
Pikul could sense the anger in her.
“I thought Vinokur was your friend,” he said, once again feeling the unpleasant rising of paranoia.
“I can’t be sure of anything anymore. He installed this bioport, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I mean, oh no!”
“What?”
“I think I see what you’re driving at.”
“He must have deliberately given you another infected bioport, so that when we jacked in together, my pod would become infected and ultimately die. As would my game system.”
“I’m infected?” Pikul said in sudden panic. “Wait a minute!”
“There was no reality bleed-through after all,” Geller said. “We were thinking about it from the wrong direction. When we were in the game, the poor thing was trying to tell us that it was sick. It was the pod that introduced the theme of disease into the game.”
“The theme of disease?”
“It wasn’t real.”
“It might not have been real in the game, but back here in the real world I’m fucking infected! Is it going to crawl up my spine and rot my brain?”
She stared at him impatiently for a moment, but then her expression changed. In a businesslike way she went back to her bag.
“All right, don’t panic,” she said. “I’ve got something that will help you.”
She brusquely wiped away the tears that had filled her eyes while she attended to the pod, and took out a cork-shaped plastic capsule from her bag. She snapped it open to reveal a knurled, pluglike electronic device.
“This’ll fix it.”
“What is it?” Pikul asked.
“I’m going to seal up your bioport with a sporicidal resonator.” She bent over him and began easing the tiny instrument into his bioport. “It uses the UmbyCord pickups for power. It should cleanse all your porting channels of infection in a few hours.”
“Is it going to hurt?”
“Is it hurting now?” she said.
“No.”
“Then it probably won’t hurt later. It’ll give you a little skin buzz when it’s done. Of course, we can’t go back into the game until then.”
“Ouch! It’s hurting now.”
“Sorry. That was me.”
When her hands moved away from him, Pikul pulled down his shirt and turned to face her once more.
“Look, this isn’t over, is it?” he said. “We seem to be out of the game for the moment but that’s surely not the end of it. What has happened here could be critical, if it’s true. Are you really saying that you think Vinokur is an agent of the Anti-eXistenZialists?”
“It’s beginning to look that way. It frightens me, but what other explanation could there be?”
“I don’t know. All I’m sure of is that if he’s one of them, then we really are in the—”
He stopped, because Geller had turned abruptly away from him.
“The pod!” she cried. “Somethings happening! Pikul, it’s dying!”
Sure enough, the pod had started quivering and rippling, turning a livid purple color in streaks. Geller fell to her knees against the side of the bed, reaching out to cradle it.
“I can’t give it any help,” she said dismally. “There’s nothing I can do for it.?
??
Her head drooped down toward it.
At that moment, without warning, there was a brilliant white-orange flash from outside and their windows and door blew in explosively. Shattered glass and wood flew about their heads.
[ 24 ]
Geller had been shielded from the worst effects of the blast by the bed, but Pikul was thrown off his feet. He tumbled and rolled across the polished pine floorboards while debris crashed all around him.
The pressure wave passed as quickly as it had come, and after a few seconds of confusion Pikul recovered, impelled by his fear of what the blast might have done to Geller. He climbed incautiously to his feet, the rubble cascading off him. He felt around his body, checking the vital organs. He was bruised and scratched in many places, but as far as he could tell, he’d suffered no serious harm.
He clambered in a state of intense anxiety across the rubble-strewn floor.
The hot glare still shone beyond the now glassless window frame, and waves of heat were billowing into the room.
It was eerily silent, but for the roar of the fire outside their chalet.
He reached Geller, and although she was severely shocked and shaken by the tremendous explosion, she appeared unhurt.
“What the hell was that about?” Pikul asked.
She glanced around the shattered room with a deeply fearful expression. Her face was white and her hands were shaking.
“I’m frightened,” she said miserably. “Pikul, I’m so dreadfully frightened . . .”
They peeked wide-eyed together through the window.
The chalet next to theirs had been destroyed by the massive explosion and was now completely engulfed in flames. Even as they watched, the one remaining upright wall collapsed backward into the inferno, sending sparks flying a hundred feet into the night air. Another wave of heat battered at them. The whole valley seemed to be infused by the orange glare.
“Listen!” Geller said. “People are coming.”
A pandemonium of shouting voices and roaring engines could be heard from lower down the mountain, as the other occupants of the ski club reacted to the catastrophe and started to rush up to this area by any means they could. Already there were men moving around the scene of the inferno outside their chalet, grappling with emergency fire hoses and unrolling them.