First: A VOYAGE IN THE HEART
``Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one nightSailed off in a wooden shoe—Sailed on a river of crystal lightInto a sea of dew.''—Eugene Field, 1850-1895
CHAPTER 1
Strange Bedfellows
NETFEED/NEWS: Little League Hostages Freed—Angry Father Killed(visual: body of Wilkes beside camper van)VO: Gerald Ray Wilkes, like many Little League parents, thought his son's team was victimized by a bad call. Unlike most of them, though, Wilkes decided to take drastic action. After beating the unpaid umpire unconscious, he forced the opposing team of eleven- and twelve-year-olds into his van at gunpoint, then led authorities on a two-state chase. He was eventually stopped by a roadblock outside Tompkinsville, Kentucky, where he was shot when he refused to surrender....LRENIE dodged Sam's first blow and ducked the second almost as easily, but the third bounced hard off the side of her head. Renie cursed and leaned away. Sam was crying and swinging blindly, but Renie didn't want to take any chances—if the sim body was a fair representation of her real self, Sam Fredericks was a strong, athletic girl. Renie grabbed her around the waist and threw her to the strangely soapy ground, then struggled to secure the girl's arms in a clinch. She failed, and was slapped on the side of the head again. Renie was having trouble keeping her own anger in check.
``Damn it, Sam, stop! That's enough!''
She finally managed to grab one of the girl's arms and used the leverage to shove Sam's head down against the ground, then climbed atop her and pulled her other arm up behind her back. For a moment the girl bucked, trying to throw her off, then her limbs went slack and her weeping took on a deeper, more heartbroken sound.
Renie kept her weight on Sam for almost a minute, until she felt the girl's convulsive sobbing begin to gentle. Hoping the worst was over, she took the risk of letting go one of the girl's arms so she could rub the spot where Sam had hit her. Her jaw clicked as she worked it. ``Jesus Mercy, girl, I think you broke my face.''
Sam twisted her head back to look at Renie, eyes wide. ``Oh my God, I'm so sorry!'' She burst into tears again.
Renie stood up. The skimpy strips of cloth she wore had nearly been pulled off her body in the struggle, as had Sam's, and both of them were streaked with pseudo-dirt. Some people would pay a lot to see this kind of thing, Renie thought sourly. Back at Mister J's, they'd put a lot of good coding into this effect—half-naked women wrestling in the dirt. ``Get up, girl,'' she said aloud. ``We're supposed to be looking for rocks, remember?''
Sam rolled over and stared up at the odd gray sky, face wet, eyes desolate. ``I won't do it, Renie! I can't do it—even if you break both my arms. He's a murderer. He killed Orlando!''
Renie silently counted to ten before speaking. ``Look, Sam, I let you scream at me—I even let you hit me and I didn't smack you back, no matter how much I wanted to. Do you think this feels good?'' She touched her tender jaw. ``It's been difficult for all of us. But we're going with that nasty old man because we have to—and I'm not going to leave you here. End of discussion. Now, are you going to make me tie you up and carry you all the way down this damned mountain, tired as I am?'' Suddenly realizing that she was indeed exhausted, she slumped down next to the girl. ``Are you really going to do that to me?''
Sam looked at her solemnly, struggling for self-control. Her breath hitched; she waited until she could speak. ``I'm sorry, Renie. But how can we go anywhere with... with... ?''
``I know. I hate the bastard—I'd like to throw him off the mountain myself. But we're going to have to live with Felix Jongleur until we get some answers to what's going on. What's that old saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?'' Renie squeezed the girl's arm. ``This is a war, Sam. Not just a single battle. Putting up with that terrible man... well, it's like being a spy behind foreign lines or something. We have to do it because we have a bigger purpose.''
Sam looked down, unable to hold Renie's gaze. ``Chizz,'' she said after long moments, but she sounded like death. ``I'll try. But I'm not going to talk to him.''
``Fine.'' Renie clambered to her feet. ``Come on. I didn't just bring you out here to talk to you alone. We still have to...'' She broke off as a shape moved slowly around one of the broken spikes of stone which were the primary features of the barren landscape. The handsome young man who stood there said nothing, but only stared back, empty-eyed as a goldfish in a bowl.
``What the hell do you want?'' Renie asked him.
The dark-haired man did not answer for a moment. ``I... am Ricardo Klement,'' he said at last.
``We know.'' Just because he was brain-damaged didn't mean he had earned any of Renie's sympathy. Before the Ceremony went awry, he had been another one of the Grail murderers, just like Jongleur. ``Go away. Leave us alone.''Klement blinked slowly. ``It is good... to be alive.'' After another pause he turned and disappeared among the rocks.
``This is so utterly horrible,'' Sam said weakly. ``I... I don't want to be here anymore, Renie.''
``Neither do I.'' Renie patted her shoulder. ``That's why we have to keep going, find our way home. No matter how much we want to give up.'' She grabbed Sam's arm and squeezed again, trying to make her hear, force her to understand. ``No matter how much. Now come on, girl, get on your feet—let's go find some more rocks.''*
*
*
!Xabbu was using the stones they had already gathered to construct a wall around Orlando's naked sim, something that looked more like a lidless coffin than a cairn. The pseudo-stones, like the rest of the environment on the black mountain, were slowly changing: with every hour that passed they looked less like the thing they were supposed to be, more like a sort of cursory 3D sketch. Orlando's Achilles sim, though, had retained its almost supernatural realism: lying in the improvised tomb, he did indeed look like a fallen demigod.
Confronted with her friend's empty shell, Sam was crying again. ``He is dead, isn't he? I keep wanting it not to be true, but that's probably how everyone feels, right?''
Renie recalled the achingly bleak months after her mother's death. ``Yes, it is. You'll be seeing him, hearing him, only he won't be there. But it gets better after a while.''
``It'll never get better. Never.'' Sam leaned down to touch Orlando's stony cheek. ``But he is dead, isn't he? Really, really dead.''
Renie was finding it almost as difficult as Sam to contemplate leaving behind a body that still looked so full of life. There had been other strange signs too. Unlike all the other sims she had seen whose living owners had died, Orlando's garments had remained soft and supple despite the marble-like solidity of the body beneath. This strange state of affairs had even made Renie wonder for a while if he might not still be living, just lost somehow in his own deep coma back in real life, but numerous surreptitious experiments—performed when Sam was otherwise distracted so as not to raise her hopes—had made Renie as certain as she could ever be in this strange place that there was no animation left in that petrified form.
Orlando's last gift to them had allowed Renie and Sam to salvage enough cloth to make crude garments, which helped Renie feel a little less vulnerable in the presence of the cold-eyed Jongleur and the vacantly childish Klement. In turning over Orlando's stiffened sim to untangle the remains of his tattered chiton, they had even found his broken sword, the hilt still bearing a few inches of blade, which had made it much easier to turn the dirty white fabric into loincloths and crude bandeau tops.
The damaged sword was the only weapon among the mountaintop survivors, perhaps the only weapon in this entire simworld, and obviously far too valuable a tool to leave behind. Renie would have preferred to carry it herself, trusting her own wariness to keep it from falling into Jongleur's hands, but Sam had been so pathetically grateful to have some keepsake from Orlando that Renie had not had the heart to argue very much; Sam now wore it thrust through the waist of her loincloth. With only a bit more than a hand's breadth of blade left, it would not make much of a weapon, although it had given Renie a nasty scratch on her leg while she and Sam had been wrestling. Still, she had to admit that in such spare circumstances the shattered blade had the look of a legendary object.
Renie shook her head, irritated at herself for getting mystical. Undecaying body or not, their friend was still dead. Orlando's sword might once have been the scourge of an imaginary gaming world, but now it would be used for digging or for sawing wood... if they ever found any. As for the miraculous cloth, it had been turned into a pair of primitive bikinis from a bad caveman flick. (!Xabbu had refused to take any of the tiny amount of fabric to clothe his own nakedness, and when Renie had offered some to Jongleur, more to protect her and Sam's own sensibilities than as a kindness, he had only laughed.)
So we'll head down the mountain this way, she thought. Three naked men and two women looking like something out of a Neandertal lingerie advertisement. And for all we know, we're the only people left alive in this whole virtual universe... except for Dread. Oh, yes, we're in great shape....
!Xabbu took the new stones they had collected, but he seemed distracted. Before asking him why, Renie made sure Jongleur was out of earshot. The master of the Grail Brotherhood stood some distance away, staring out into the weirdly depthless sky from the rim of the cliff. Renie couldn't help wondering again what it would feel like to shove him over the edge.
``You look worried,'' she told !Xabbu as he shored up the walls around Orlando's body. ``How are we supposed to cover the top of this, by the way?''
``I am worried because I do not think we have time to doOthat. I think we must leave Orlando's grave this way and begin our journey soon. I am sorry—I wanted to do better.''
``What are you talking about?''
``We have all seen what has happened to this place just since we have been here—how things are losing their edges, their color. While I was out looking for more stones, I discovered something that worried me. The trail is losing truth, too.''
She shook her head, confused. ``What do you mean?''
``Maybe I have used the wrong word. I am talking of the trail which we climbed to come here, with Martine and Paul Jonas and the others, before everything became so strange—the trail along the mountainside. It is changing as everything else here is changing, Renie, but there was not much... what is the word? There was not much truth, much... reality to it in the first place. Already it looks old and blurry.''
Despite the permanent room-temperature ambience, Renie felt a chill. Without that path they would be trapped on top of a miles-high mountain that was rapidly losing its coherence. And what if gravity was the last thing to go?
``You're right. We leave soon.'' She turned to Sam, who was brooding over Orlando's empty sim. ``Did you hear that? We're running out of time here.''
The girl was dry-eyed now, but the composure did not go very deep. It was still strange for Renie to see Sam's true face. It had been even stranger to discover that Sam had a black father, and a distinct African look to her features despite her tawny hair. Her teenage dialect had been so compellingly middle-American that even Renie herself had unconsciously typed the girl (even when everyone had still thought her a boy) as white. ``He still looks so... perfect,'' Sam said quietly. ``What's going to happen to him if this place goes away?''
Renie shook her head. ``I don't know. But remember, that's not him, Sam. That's not even his body. Wherever Orlando is, he must be in a better place than this.''
``We need a little rest before we go anywhere,'' !Xabbu said. ``We have none of us slept since the night before Troy was destroyed, and that seems a long time ago. It will be no help to hurry down the mountain if we are not making good choices—if we stumble and fall because we are so tired.''
Renie started to object, but of course he was right: they were all exhausted—in fact, it was !Xabbu himself who usually got the least sleep and insisted on taking the most strenuous duties. It might only be a sim and not his true body, but he was still sagging with weariness. Even Sam's emotional volatility, unsurprising after what they had all been through, might be improved with rest.
``Okay,'' she said. ``We'll take a few hours to sleep. But only if you go first.''
``I am used to being without sleep, Renie...''
``I don't care if you're used to it. It's your turn. I'll stand first watch, then I'll wake Sam up for the second. So just lie down, will you?''
!Xabbu shrugged and smiled. ``If you say so, Beloved Porcupine.''
``Stop that.'' She looked around. ``It would be nice if it ever got dark here.'' She remembered the terror of sudden nightfall in the other unfinished land. ``Well, maybe not. Anyway, just close your eyes.''
``You could sleep too, Renie.''
``And not have anyone keeping an eye on Jongleur? Chance not, as the young people say.''
!Xabbu curled up on the ground. Trained by his nomadic people to snatch the opportunity when it was available, within moments his breathing slowed and his muscles relaxed.
Renie reached out once and touched his hair, still awed to have the old !Xabbu back again. Or a virtual version of him. She glanced at Felix Jongleur, still staring out into the sky like a ship's captain watching the weather, then at Sam, crouched silently beside Orlando's cairn. Although her knee was touching Renie's leg, the girl seemed farther away than Jongleur.
``You get some sleep too,'' Renie told her. ``Sam? Do you hear me?''
The girl looked up, a flash of anger on her face. ``You're not my mother, seen?''
Renie sighed. ``No, I'm not. But I am a grown woman and I'm trying to help. And if you ever want to see that mother of yours again, you must stay alert and healthy.''
Sam's look softened. ``Sorry. Sorry I'm being so stupid. I just... I want this all to be over. I want to go home.''
``We're doing our best. Lie down for a while, even if you don't sleep.''
``Chizz.'' She stretched out beside Orlando's body and closed her eyes, one hand touching the low stone wall. It gave Renie a superstitious shiver to see it.
I can't even remember, she thought, what it felt like when life was normal.
Both !Xabbu and Sam were still sleeping soundly after something like an hour had passed, as deeply as her brother Stephen had used to sleep after a long day of childish hyperactivity. Sam was snoring quietly, and Renie was reluctant to wake her up. She felt a brief desire for a cigarette, and realized with surprise that it had been a long time since she had thought about smoking.
Just too damned busy trying not to get...
