Mister Sellars shook his head and picked up the knife. He almost dropped it, his hands were shaking so much, but then he held it out to Christabel. He wanted her to cut the soap.
She sawed away at the slippery bar for some time. She had done soap carving in class, but it wasn't easy. This time she concentrated very hard, and at last she managed to cut off a piece as wide as two of her fingers side by side. Mister Sellars reached out a hand like a melted bird claw and took it from her, then popped it in his mouth and slowly began to chew.
"Yuck!" she said. "That's bad for you!"
Mister Sellars smiled for the first time. Little white bubbles were in the corner of his mouth.
He took the soap and the knife from her and began to cut himself more pieces. When he had swallowed the first and was about to put the second in his mouth, he smiled again and said: "Go get changed." His voice was weak, but at least he sounded like the Mister Sellars she knew.
When she returned wearing the terrycloth bathrobe, he had finished the whole first bar and had begun to cut up another.
"Thank you, Christabel," he said. "Zinc peroxide—just what the doctor ordered. I've been very busy and I haven't been getting my vitamins and minerals."
"People don't eat soap for vitamins!" she said indignantly. But she wasn't completely sure, because since she'd been in school she'd been getting her vitamins in a skin patch, and maybe old people had a different kind of vitamins.
"I do," the old man said. "And I was very sick until you got here."
"But you're better now?"
"Much better. But you should never eat any—it's just for special old men." He wiped a smear of white from his lower lip. "I've been working very, very hard, little Christabel. People to see, things to do." Which was a silly joke, she knew, because he never went anywhere or saw anyone but her and the man who delivered his food, he'd told her that. His smile went away and his eyes started to close. After a moment, he opened them again, but he looked very tired. "And now that you've rescued me, perhaps you'd better head back home. I'm sure you had to make up some story about where you were going. I feel guilty enough about having you lie to your parents without getting you in trouble by keeping you too long."
"How did you talk to me in my Storybook Sunglasses?"
"Oh, just a little trick I learned when I was a young cadet." His head wobbled a little. "I think I need to sleep now, my friend. Can you let yourself out?"
She sat up straight. "I always let myself out."
"So you do. So you do." He raised his hand as if he were waving to her. His eyes closed again.
When Christabel had changed back into her clothes—they were damp, so she would have to walk around for a while before she went home—Mister Sellars was asleep in his chair. She looked at him carefully to make sure he wasn't sick again, but he was a much pinker color than he'd been when she arrived. She cut him off a few more pieces of soap, just in case he felt weak when he woke up again, then tucked his blanket close around his long thin neck.
"It's so difficult," he said suddenly. She jumped back, afraid she'd woken him up, but his eyes did not open and his voice was whispery and hard to understand. "Everything must be hidden in plain sight. But I despair sometimes—I can only speak to them in whispers, half-truths, bits of tattered poetry. I know how the oracle felt—"
He mumbled a bit more, but she couldn't hear the words. When he got quiet and didn't say anything more, she patted his thin hand and left. A cloud of mist followed her out the front door. The wind on her wet clothing made her shiver.
An oracle was a kind of bird, wasn't it? So was Mister Sellars dreaming about the days when he used to be an airman?
The leaves came swirling down the sidewalk past her, skipping and tumbling like circus acrobats.
His arms were pinioned. He was being jostled and pushed down a dark trail, sheer cliff faces looming on either side. He was being carried away, he knew, down into blackness and nothingness. Something important lay behind him, something that he dared not lose, but every moment the hands that clutched him, the shadowy forms on either side, were carrying him farther and farther away from it.
He tried to turn and felt a sharp pain in his arm, as though someone held a needle-bladed dagger against the flesh. The deeper darkness of the mountain pass was reaching out to enfold him. He struggled, ignoring the piercing agony in his arms, and at last managed to pull free enough to turn his head.
In the cleft behind him, nestled between the rocky slopes but miles away, lay a field of sparkling golden light. As he looked out from shadow, it burned in the distance like a prairie fire.
The city. The place where he would find the thing he had hungered for so long. . . .
The hands seized him and turned him back around, then shoved him forward. He still could not see who held him, but he knew that they were dragging him down into shadow, into emptiness, into a place where even the memory of the golden city at last would fade. He fought against his captors but he was held fast.
His dream, his one hope, was receding. He was being carried down helplessly into a black void. . . .
"Orlando! Orlando! You're having a bad dream. Wake up."
He struggled upward toward the voice. His arms hurt—they had him! He had to fight! He had to. . . .
He opened his eyes. His mother's face hovered over him, shining faintly in the light from the window like a three-quarter moon.
"Look what you've done." Concern fought with annoyance in her voice; concern won, but just barely. "You've knocked all your things over."
"I . . . I was having a bad dream."
"As if I couldn't tell. It's that net. all day long. No wonder you have nightmares." She sighed, then bent and began picking things up.
A little anger pierced his lingering chill. "You think the net is the only reason I have nightmares?"
She paused, a wad of dermal patches filling her palm like fallen leaves. "No," she said. Her voice was tight. "No, of course I don't" She put the patches on his bedside table and bent to pick up the other things he had knocked over. "But I still think it can't be good for you to spend so much time plugged into . . . into that machine."
Orlando laughed. It was an angry laugh, and he meant it to be. "Well, everybody needs a hobby, Vivien."
She pursed her lips, even though it had been his parents' idea that he should call them by their first names, not his. "Don't be bitter, Orlando."
"I'm not" And he wasn't, really, he realized. Not like sometimes. But he was angry and frightened and he wasn't quite sure why. Something to do with the nightmare, the details of which were already beginning to evaporate—a feeling that something else was also slipping away from him. He took a breath. "I'm sorry. I'm just . . . it was a scary dream."
She set his IV stand back up straight—he had tipped it over against the wall with his thrashing—and checked to make sure the needle was still in place and secured. "Doctor Vanh says we can stop using this at the end of the week. That will be nice, won't it?" It was her way of apologizing. He tried to accept it in good grace.
"Yeah, that'll be nice." He yawned. "I'll go back to sleep. Sorry if I made a lot of noise."
She pulled the blanket back up to his chest For a moment she rested her cool hand against his cheek. "We . . . I was just worried. No more bad dreams, now. Promise?"
He slid down, found the remote, and tilted the upper part of the bed to a more comfortable angle. "Okay, Vivien. Good night."
"Good night, Orlando." She hesitated for a moment then leaned to kiss him before she went out.
For a moment he considered turning on his nightlight to read, then decided against it. Knowing that his mother had heard his distress from the other room made the darkness a little more comfortable than usual, and he had things to think about.
The city, for one thing. That preposterous place, of which no record seemed to remain in the Middle Country. It had invaded his dreams just as it had invaded Thargor's world. Why did something which was probably no more th
an a bit of signal interference, or at most a hacker's prank, seem so important? He had given up believing in far more practical types of miracles long ago, so what could this mirage possibly mean for him? Did it signify anything at all, or was it only a freak occurrence acting now as a magnet for his fear and largely abandoned hope?
The house was quiet. Nothing short of an explosion would wake his father, and by now his mother would have slid back down into her own shallower and more restless slumber. Orlando was alone in the darkness with his thoughts.
CHAPTER 11
Inside the Beast
NETFEED/MUSIC: Christ Plays For Lucky Few
(visual: close-up of dog's head)
VO: Johann Sebastian Christ made a surprise appearance on a local net show in his adopted hometown of New Orleans—
(visual: dog head, human hands)
—the first time the reclusive singer has been seen since the death of three members of his musical group Blond Bitch in a stage accident last year.
(visual: man dancing in dog mask, flaming stage shown on wallscreen in background)
Christ performed three songs for the astonished studio audience, accompanying himself with a playback of the accident. . . .
Renie turned, frantically scanning the crowd that filled the terraces around the bottomless well. !Xabbu hadn't replied, but perhaps there was something wrong with his equipment. Perhaps he'd just gone offline, and there was something wrong with her equipment, which still registered a guest on her line. She prayed it was that simple.
The crush was insubstantial but still overwhelming. Laughing businessmen in smoothly tailored, blade-hard bodies bumped her aside as they passed, their first-class and paid-up accounts generating an invisible but very real barrier between them and the hoi polloi. A few obvious tourists in rudimentary virtual forms moved aimlessly, overwhelmed, as the swirling traffic bounced them from one edge of the walkway to the other. Smaller forms, servitor creatures and agents, darted in and out of the throng, running errands for their masters. As far as Renie could tell, !Xabbu was not one of them, but her search was made more difficult by the unexceptional quality of the sim he had been wearing. There were at least two dozen quite similar figures within a short distance of her, gawking at the scenery while trying to stay out of the way of the big spenders.
Even if he were close by, without audio contact it was impossible to locate him quickly, and Renie knew she had only moments before Strimbello arrived. She needed to move, to get going—but where? Even if she ran far and fast, she couldn't hope to hide for very long within Mister J's from someone who was connected to the club. Besides, the fat man had announced that he knew her, knew who she truly was. Even now the club's management might be accessing her index, contacting the Poly to get her fired—who could guess?
But she could not afford those worries right now. She had to find !Xabbu.
Had he simply gone offline, disgusted by the Yellow Room's grotesque floor show? He might even now be loosening his straps in the Harness Room, waiting for her to return. But what if he hadn't?
A startled eddy of reaction passed over the faces around her. Most of the terrace crowd turned toward the door of the Yellow Room. Renie turned, too.
Something huge had appeared in the passage behind her, vast and round, wider than four or five normal sims and still growing. Its shaven head swiveled like the turret on a tank; black eyes like machine gun barrels raked the crowd, then locked on her.
The thing that called itself Strimbello smiled. "There you are."
Renie spun, took two swift steps, and flung herself over the rim of the well. Moving at top permissible speed, she dove downward through other, less hurried club patrons who floated like lazy fish. Her descent was still agonizingly slow—the well was a browsing device, not a thrill-ride—but she did not intend to outrun the fat man: he almost undoubtedly knew Mister J's far too well for that to work. She had simply moved out of his visual field for a moment, which she hoped would give her time to do something more effective.
"Random," she commanded.
The well and its thousands of sims bobbing like champagne bubbles blurred and vanished, replaced a moment later by another crush of bodies, all naked this time, although some bore attributes she had never seen on a living human form. The light was directionless and low, the close-leaning walls velvety folds of uterine red. Throbbing music made her hearplugs almost bounce. A sim face, frighteningly imprecise, looked up from the nearest coil of forms; a hand snaked free and reached out to her, beckoning.
"Oh, no," she murmured. How many of these shapes were minors, children like Stephen, admitted with a smirk by the management and allowed to glut themselves on the filth of this place? How many disguised children had been present in the Yellow Room, for that matter? Nausea knotted her stomach. "Random."
A vast flat-walled space opened before her, its farther end so distant as to be nearly invisible. Gasflame blue letters appeared before her in a script she did not recognize, while a voice intoned words into her hearplugs that were equally incomprehensible. An instant later the whole picture shuddered as the translation software read her index and changed to English.
". . . Choose now whether you wish a team game or an individual competition."
She stood and stared as humanoid shapes snapped into existence just behind the blue-burning letters. They wore spiked helmets and shiny body armor, the eyes within the visors were only sparks.
"You have opted for an individual competition," said the voice with a faint note of approval. "The game is creating your designated opponents now. . . ."
"Random."
She moved through the rooms faster and faster, hoping to lay down so many kinks in her trail that even if they tried to pin her location directly it would take Strimbello some time to find her. She jumped, and found. . . .
A pool, surrounded by lazily swaying palm trees. Bare-breasted mermaids lounged on the rocks beside it, combing their hair as they swayed to languid steel guitar music.
She jumped.
A long table with one empty seat. The dozen men waiting there all wore robes; most also wore beards. One turned as she popped in, smiled, and cried, "Seat yourself, Lord."
She jumped again, and kept jumping.
A room full of blackness, with stars gleaming distantly up where the roof should be, and red-lit crevices in the floor. Somebody or something was groaning.
A thousand men with smooth heads like crash dummies, all dressed in identical coveralls, sitting on benches in two long rows, slapping each other.
A jungle full of shadows and eyes and bright, colorful birds. A woman in a torn blouse was tied to a tree. Oily red blossoms were piled around her feet.
A cowboy saloon. The bad guys wore nothing but spurs.
A ship's rocking cabin, oil lamps swinging, tankards waiting in the gimbals.
A glittering ballroom where all the women's faces were hidden behind animal masks.
A medieval inn. The fire burned high and something howled outside the tiny windows.
An empty park bench beside a streetlight.
A blast of throbbing noise and blinding glare that might have been a dance club.
A cave with wet walls, illuminated by strands like glowing spiderwebs that dangled from the ceiling.
An old-fashioned phone box. The receiver was off the hook.
A desert with walls.
A casino that seemed to inhabit the gangster era of Hollywood movies.
A desert without walls.
A chamber with an oven-hot floor and all the furniture made of metal.
A formal Korean garden, the bushes full of grunting naked shapes.
An open-air café beside the ruins of an ancient freeway.
A terraced garden jutting like a theater balcony from the side of a tall cliff. Beside it, a vast waterfall thundered down into the gorge. . . .
Dizzy, almost ill from the speed of her transitions, Renie paused on the terrace. She closed her eyes until the blur of colors s
topped, then opened them again. A few of the dozen or so guests sitting at tables along the edge of the garden looked up incuriously, then turned back to their conversations and the spectacle of the waterfall.
"May I serve you?" A smiling, elderly Asian man had materialized beside her.
"I'm having trouble with my pad," she told him. "Can you connect me to your main switching center?"
"Done. Would you like a table while you conduct your business, Mister Otepi?"
Damn. She had stopped in one of the high-rent zones of the club, Of course they would have run her index as soon as she entered. At least they hadn't grabbed her, maybe Strimbello hadn't put out a general alert. Still, there was no sense pushing her luck. "Not yet, thank you. I may have to leave. Just a privacy shield, please."
The man nodded and then vanished. A circle of blue light appeared around her at waist level, demonstrating that she was shielded. She could still hear the roar of the great waterfall and watch it smashing down the rocks into the canyon, where it disappeared into a cloud of white spume; she could even see the other guests and hear the occasional snatch of conversation over the water noises—but they, presumably, could no longer see or hear her.
No time to waste. She forced herself to think calmly. She dared not leave unless !Xabbu had already gone offline, but if he had, she would have no way of knowing. If she stayed, she felt sure Strimbello would find her sooner rather than later. He might not have sounded a general alarm—even as an intruder, she was probably not very important in the larger scheme of things—but Strimbello himself, whether human or frighteningly realistic Puppet, did not seem the type to give up easily. She would have to find a way to stay inside the system until she either located !Xabbu or was forced to give up.
"Phone connect."
A gray square appeared before her, as though someone had taken a sharp knife to reality—rather, to imitation reality. She gave the number she wanted, then keyed in her pad's identification code. The square remained gray, but a small glowing dot appeared in the lower corner to tell her she'd connected with the one-shot access bank she'd prepared for just such an emergency.