It was too much to comprehend.
"Do you have any idea how to make this ship work?" she asked Sweet William.
"Dead simple, really." He smiled lazily and stretched. Hidden bells jingled. "It's got a bit of a handle. Push, pull, forward, back—could do it in me sleep."
"Then we'll put these two and the rest of the crew overboard." She was startled by the adjutant's violent reaction for a moment, then realized the misunderstanding. "In the lifeboats. There seem to be plenty."
"Aye, aye." William saluted jauntily. "Whenever you're ready, Admiral."
The bed in He Who Is Favored Above All Others' massive stateroom was of a size commensurate with celestial royalty. Martine and Orlando lay at either edge where they could be reached by those caring for them, with a dozen-foot expanse of silken sheets between them.
Orlando was sleeping, but Renie didn't think it was a healthy sleep. The big man's breath rasped in and out through his gaping mouth and the muscles in his fingers and face twitched. She laid her palm against his broad forehead, but felt nothing any more unusual than the mere fact of virtual tactility.
!Xabbu clambered up onto the bed and touched the man's face, but he seemed to have a different purpose in mind than Renie had, for he left his delicate simian hand there for a long time.
"He looks very sick," Renie said.
"He is." The slender man named Fredericks looked up from his seat by Orlando's side. "He's real sick."
"What is it? Is it something he caught outside—in RL, I mean? Or is it some effect from coming into the network?"
Fredericks shook his head morosely. "He's got something bad. In real life. It's a disease where you get old too soon—he told me the name, but I forgot" He rubbed at his eyes; when he spoke again, his voice was faint "I think right now he's got pneumonia. He said . . . he said he was dying."
Renie stared at the sleeping man's almost cartoonish face, the square jaw and long black hair. Even after only a short acquaintance, the thought of his death was painful; she turned away, helpless and miserable. Too many victims, too many suffering innocents, not enough strength to save any of them.
Quan Li, who had been holding Martine's hand, stood up as Renie walked around the perimeter of the huge bed. "I wish there was something more I could do for your friend. She is a little quieter now. I thought of offering her some water. . . ." She trailed off. There was no need to finish. Martine, like everyone else, must be receiving nourishment and hydration in the real world. If not, nothing the Chinese woman or anyone else could do would help.
Renie sat on the edge of the bed and wrapped her hand around Martine's. The Frenchwoman had not spoken a word all the way to the ship, and after Sweet William had snatched up the gun which Orlando had tossed away, and pressed it against the adjutant's head to secure their passage on the barge, Martine had collapsed. Renie had carried her on board with Quan Li's help—it had taken three of the sailors to carry bulky Orlando—but there was nothing else she could think of to do. Whatever was afflicting Martine was even more mysterious than the young man's ailment.
"We're going to put the captain and crew into boats and set them free," Renie said after a while.
"Are there enough of us to run the ship?" Quan Li asked.
"William says it pretty much sails itself, but I suppose we need enough people to keep watch." Frowning, she thought for a moment. "What did I say we were? Nine?" She turned. !Xabbu was still crouched beside Orlando, his hands splayed on the big man's chest. His patient seemed to be resting a little more easily. "Well, there's the six of us in here. There's William, although he almost counts for two." She smiled wearily, for Quan Li's benefit as much as her own. "The robot man—what did he call himself, T-Four-B or something? And the woman who went up the rigging to keep watch. Yes, nine. Besides, having a full crew would matter more if we had some idea where we were going. . . ."
She broke off as she realized that the gentle pressure on her fingers was becoming stronger. Martine's eyes were open, but still unfixed.
"Renie. . . ?"
"I'm here. We're on the ship. We're hoping to be out of this Temilún simulation soon."
"I'm . . . I'm blind, Renie." She forced the words out with great effort.
"I know, Martine. We'll do our best to find a way to. . . ." She was stopped by a very hard squeeze.
"No, you do not understand. I am blind. Not just here. I have been blind for a very long time."
"You mean . . . in your real life?"
Martine nodded slowly. "But I have . . . there are modifications on my system that allow me to read my way through the net. I see the data in my own way." She paused; speaking was obviously difficult. "In some ways, it has made me better at what I do than if I had sight, do you understand? But now everything is very bad."
"Because of the information rate, like you said?"
"Yes. I . . . since I have come here, it is like people screaming in both my ears, like I am being blown in a great wind. I cannot. . . ." She brought trembling hands up to her face. "I am going mad. Ah, may the good Lord save me, I am going mad." Her face contorted, although no tears came to the sim's eyes. Her shoulders began to shake.
Renie could only hold her as she wept.
Two large lifeboats held the ship's three dozen crew fairly comfortably. Renie stood on the deck, feeling the shudder of the engine beneath her feet, and watched the last sailor drop from the ladder into the boat, black pigtail flying.
"Are you sure you don't want another lifeboat?" she called down to the captain. "You'd be less crowded."
He looked up at her, plainly unable to comprehend this kind of soft-hearted piracy. "It is not far to shore. We will be fine." He mumbled his lip plug for a moment, contemplating an indiscretion. "You know, the patrol boats have only remained at a distance to protect the lives of the crew. They will stop you and board you within minutes after we are safe."
"We're not worried." Renie tried to sound confident, but of all their company only !Xabbu seemed truly calm. The small man had found a long piece of twine in the captain's cabin and was blithely constructing one of his intricate string figures.
Renie's intention to release the hostages before the ship reached the simulation's edge had been the subject of long discussion, but she had been adamant. She would not risk taking the Temilúni out of their world. Perhaps the Otherland machinery would not compensate for them in this peculiar circumstance, and they would then cease to exist. It would be no better than mass murder.
The captain shrugged and sat down. He signaled to one of his men to start the engine. The boat glided forward and then began to pick up speed, chugging along after the adjutant's boat, which was already only a white dot against the darkness.
A beam of light cut through the fog from the far side of the barge, flicking across the undraped mast.
"Well, there they are, chuck," said William. He held up his confiscated pistol and looked at it sadly. "This won't be much use against the Royal Featherhead Navy, now will it?"
More lights appeared, these fixed like low-slung stars. Several large vessels were coming up fast behind them. One of them blew a long deep note on a steam-whistle, a sound that vibrated in Renie's bones.
!Xabbu had put down his string. "Perhaps we should consider. . . ."
He never had a chance to finish his suggestion. Something whistled past them and splashed into the water off the bow. A moment later a globe of fire bloomed in the deeps, fountaining the coastal waters and releasing a sullen thump as the sound reached the surface.
"They're shooting at us," shouted Fredericks from one of the hatchways. Renie was silently commending him for obviousness under combat conditions when she noticed that the exploding shell had left some kind of unexpected aftereffect in the depths before them. The waters sparkled with glittering points of neon blue.
Renie caught her breath. She struggled to remember the name of the robot Goggleboy currently in the barge's wheel-house, but could not. "Tell what's-his-name full speed ahe
ad!" she screamed. "I think we're there!"
Another shell arched overhead and slashed into the water, nearer this time. The impact made the barge rock so that Renie and William had to grab at the railing. Slowly, though, she could feel the ship picking up speed.
She leaned over, squinting at the dark swells. Surely the sparkling blue light was brighter now. It looked like an entire school of some exotic bioluminescent fishes had surrounded the royal barge.
Something exploded directly beneath them. The entire front end of the barge lifted up, as though shoved from beneath by a giant hand. Renie fell to the deck and slid. The barge tipped sideways; then, like a living creature, it seemed to find its center of balance, and dropped back down into a trough between waves. The water rising around them seemed pulsingly alive with blue light.
It was alive, it was electrically active, radiant and throbbingly, brilliantly, vital. . . .
All the sounds of sea and ship and exploding shells abruptly stopped. In perfect silence and an absolute blue glow, they passed through.
Renie's first thought was that they were caught in the timeless instant of an explosion, stuck in the dreary heart of a quantum event that would never end. The bright light, more white than blue now, dazzled her so that she had to shut her eyes against the pain.
When she carefully opened them a moment later, the light was still there, but she realized it was only the brilliance of an ordinary daytime sky. They had left the night behind them in Temilún.
Her second thought was that the last explosion had blown the entire top off the barge. They still bobbed on the water, and the coastline—now revealed in crystal-clear daylight and full of startlingly huge trees as wide and tall as skyscrapers—was very visible, but there was no longer a railing to look over.
Renie realized she was on her knees, clutching at something curving and fibrous and as thick as her arm that stretched where the railing had been. She dragged herself around so she could look back at where the rest of the barge had been, the wheel-house, the royal apartment. . . .
Her companions were lying in the center of something that was large and flat, but otherwise nothing like a barge—something ribbed and dimpled like a giant piece of modern sculpture, something that curled at the edges and was as stiffly yielding as crocodile hide beneath Renie's hand.
"!Xabbu?" she said. "Are you all right?"
"We have all survived." He still wore his baboon body. "But we. . . ."
Renie lost the rest of his sentence in a growing drone from somewhere above. She stared at the flat expanse upon which they all lay, at the almost ragged shape of its edges where they curled up from the water, and realized what the thing they were floating on looked like. Not a boat at all, but. . . .
"A . . . leaf?"
The droning was growing louder and louder, making it hard to think. The huge trees on the distant shoreline . . . It made a sort of sense, then—they were not a trick of distortion and distance. But was the place itself too large, or were she and her companions. . . ?
The sound rattled in her ears. Renie looked up to see something the size of a single-engine airplane glide overhead, hover for a moment so that the wind almost knocked her flat, and then speed away again, wings glinting like stained glass in the bright, bright sun.
It was a dragonfly.
Jeremiah found him going through the cabinets in the kitchen for perhaps the dozenth time, looking for something that both of them knew was not there.
"Mr. Sulaweyo?"
Renie's father tugged open another door and began shoving industrial-sized cans and heat-sealed ration packs out of his way, working with ragged intensity. When he had cleared a hole, he reached in until his armpit was pressing into the front of the shelf and groped in the darkness at the back of the cabinet.
"Mr. Sulaweyo. Joseph."
He turned to stare at Jeremiah, his eyes red-rimmed. "What you want?"
"I want a little help. I've been sitting at the console for hours. If you'll take a turn, I can make us something to eat."
"Don't want nothing to eat." Long Joseph turned back to his search. After a moment he cursed, retracted his arm, then began the same process on the next shelf down.
"You don't have to eat, then, but I do. In any case, that's your daughter in that tank, not mine."
A canister of soy meal tipped off the shelf and thumped onto the floor. Long Joseph continued to scrabble in the space at the back of the shelf. "Don't you tell me about my daughter. I know who's in that tank."
Jeremiah Dako made a noise of angry frustration and turned to go. He stopped in the doorway. "I'm not going to sit there forever staring at those screens. I can't. And when I fall asleep, nobody will be checking their heart rates, nobody will be watching in case the tanks go wrong."
"God damn!" A line of plastic sacks slid off the shelf and toppled. One broke, puffing a sulfurous spray of powdered egg across the cement floor. "God damn this place!" Long Joseph swept more sacks from the shelf, then muscled a can up over his head and flung it down so hard it bounced before coming to rest against the rear wall. An ooze of syrup trickled from beneath the crumpled lid. "What the hell kind of place is this?" he shouted. "How someone supposed to live like this, in some goddamn cave in the ground?" Long Joseph lifted another can as though to throw it and Jeremiah flinched, but instead he lowered it again, staring at it as though it had just been handed to him by a visitor from outer space.
"Look at this craziness," he said, holding it out for Jeremiah to examine. Jeremiah did not move. "Look, it say 'Corn Porridge.' They got goddamn mielie pap in ten gallon cans! Enough porridge to choke an elephant, but they don't got even one beer." He laughed harshly and dropped the can on the floor. It rolled ponderously against a cabinet door. "Shit. I want a drink. I am so dry."
Wide-eyed, Jeremiah shook his head. "There's nothing here."
"I know that. I know. But sometimes a man just have to look." Long Joseph looked up from the mess on the floor. He seemed on the verge of tears. "You say you want to sleep, go sleep. Show me what to do with that goddamn machine."
". . . That's all. Heartbeat and body temperature are really the important things. You can bring them out just by pushing this—it lifts the tank covers—but your daughter said not to do it unless they were really in trouble."
Long Joseph stared at the two cable-draped sarcophagi, both now standing upright. "I can't take this," he said at last.
"What do you mean?" There was an edge of irritation in Jeremiah's voice. "You said you'd watch for me—I am exhausted."
The other man didn't seem to hear him. "It's just like Stephen. Just like my boy. She right there, but I can't touch her, can't help her, can't do anything." He scowled. "She right there, but I can't do anything."
Jeremiah stared at him for a moment. His face softened. He put his hand gently on Long Joseph's shoulder. "Your daughter is trying to help. She's very brave."
Joseph Sulaweyo shrugged the hand away, his eyes fixed on the tanks as though he could see through the dense fibramic shells. "She one damn fool, what she is. She think just because she go to the university she know everything. But I tried to tell her these weren't people to mess about with. She wouldn't listen. None of them listen, they never do."
His face suddenly crumpled and he blinked at tears. "All the children gone. All the children gone away."
Jeremiah started to reach out again, then pulled back his hand. After a long silence, he turned and made his way to the elevator, leaving the other man alone with the silent tanks and the bright screens.
Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow
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