City of Golden Shadow, Page 79

  (visual: UN truck being driven through frenzied crowd)

  The three-and-a-half million refugees are almost entirely without shelter, and many are suffering from tuberculosis, typhoid, and Guantanamo fever. By making Merida a nation in its own right, the UN can now declare martial law and bring the new country under its direct jurisdiction. . . .

  "Dzang, Orlando, you were right! You were right!" Fredericks was leaping up and down on the beach, almost crazy with excitement and terror."Where are we? What happened? That's it! You were right!"

  Orlando could feel sand beneath the palms of his hand, hot and gritty and undeniable. He scooped up a handful and let it pour away again. It was real. It was all real. And the city, wilder and more wonderful than anything in a fairy tale, the golden city was real, too, stretching almost as far as he could see, reaching toward the sky in a profusion of towers and pyramids as ornate as Russian Easter eggs. The thing that had haunted him was now just a few miles away, separated from him only by an expanse of blue ocean. He was sitting on a beach, an inarguable beach, staring at his own dream.

  And before that, he had passed through a nightmare. That darkness, and then that thing, that hungry, horrid thing. . . .

  But it wasn't only a dream. There was something real behind it—like it was a puppet show. Like my mind was trying to make sense of something too big to understand. . . .

  There was more wrong than just the nightmare. Wherever he was, he had not left the illnesses of his real body behind. The city stood in front of him—the couldn't-be city, the don't-dare-hope city—and yet he could barely force himself to care. He was melting like a candle, giving off too much heat. A big, hot something inside him was eating away at his thoughts, filling his head and pressing behind his eyes.

  Where are we?

  Fredericks was still jumping up and down in an ecstasy of uncertainty. As Orlando struggled to his feet, he realized that the Fredericks he was looking at was wearing the body of Pithlit, arch-thief of the Middle Country.

  That's wrong, he thought, but could not pursue it any farther. Standing up had only made him feel worse. The golden-daubed city suddenly tilted, and Orlando tried to follow it, but instead the sand jumped up to meet him, slamming against him as though it were one solid thing.

  Something in the dark touched me. . . .

  The world was spinning, spinning. He closed his eyes and went away.

  Pithlit the Thief was shaking him. Orlando's head felt like a rotten melon; at every wobble it seemed about to burst.

  "Orlando?" Fredericks seemed to have no idea how much his voice was making Orlando's bones ache. "Are you okay?"

  ". . . Sick. Stop shaking. . . ."

  Fredericks let go. Orlando rolled onto his side, hugging himself. He could feel the bright sun beating down on his skin, but it was a weather report from another part of the country; deep inside him there was now a chill resistant to any sun, real or simulated He felt the first shivers begin.

  "You're shivering," Fredericks pointed out. Orlando gritted his teeth, lacking the strength even to be sarcastic. "Are you cold? But it's hot! No, what does that matter? Sorry, man. We need to put something over you—all you're wearing is that loin cloth." Fredericks looked around, scanning the empty tropical beach as though someone might have thoughtfully left a down comforter behind one of the lava rocks. He turned back to Orlando as another thought struck him. "Why are you in your Thargor sim? When did you put that on?"

  Orlando could only groan.

  Fredericks knelt beside him. His eyes were still wide, pupils pinned like a lab animal given too much of something strong, but he was struggling his way back to some kind of logic. "Here, you can have my cloak." He untied it and draped it around Orlando's shoulders. Beneath he was wearing his character's usual gray shirt and breeches. "But, hey, this is Pithlit's cloak! Am I Pithlit like you're Thargor?"

  Orlando nodded weakly.

  "But I never . . . this is scanny!" Fredericks paused. "Feel this. It feels real. Orlando, where are we? What happened? Is this somewhere on the net?"

  "Nobody . . . on the net . . . has equipment like this." He struggled to keep his teeth from chattering: the clicking made his head hurt even more. "We're . . . I don't know where we are."

  "But there's the city, just like you told me." Fredericks wore the look of a jaded child who has unexpectedly encountered the actual Santa Claus. "That is the city you meant, right?" He laughed, a little shrilly. "Of course it is. What else would it be? But where are we?"

  Orlando was finding it difficult to keep track of Fredericks' overstressed chattering. He wrapped the cloak tighter and lay down to ride out another wave of shivers. "I think . . . I have to sleep . . . for a few minutes. . . ."

  Blackness reached out for him again, gathering him in.

  Orlando floated through fever dreams of stone tombs and Uncle Jingle singing and his mother searching through the halls of their house for something she had lost. Once he surfaced to feel Fredericks holding his hand.

  ". . . Think it's an island," his friend was saying. "There's a temple or something made out of stones, but I don't think anyone uses it any more, and that's about it. I couldn't set all the way to the other side, because there's like an amazingly thick forest—well, more like a jungle—but I think because of the way the beaches curve. . . ."

  Orlando slid down again.

  As he bobbed in the buffeting currents of his illness, he snatched at the few thoughts swimming past which seemed part of reality. The monkey-children had wanted to take him to someone . . . an animal? . . . an animal name? . . . who knew about the golden city. But instead they had all been seized by something that had shaken him almost to pieces, as a dog grabs and dispatches a rat.

  A dog. Something about a dog.

  And now he was somewhere else, and the city was there, so he must be dreaming, because the city was a dream-thing.

  But Fredericks was in the dream, too.

  Another thought, cold and hard as a stone, dropped into his fevered mind.

  I'm dying. I'm in that horrible Crown Heights Medical Center, and I'm strapped onto a bunch of machines. The life is draining out of me, and all that's left is this one little part of my mind, making a whole world out of a few brain cells and a few memories. And Vivien and Conrad are probably sitting next to the bed practicing their coping-with-grief skills, but they don't know I'm still in here. I'm still in here! Trapped in the top floor of a burning building and the flames are climbing up, one story at a time, and all the firefighters are giving up and going home. . . .

  I'm still in here!

  "Orlando, wake up. You're having a bad dream or something. Wake up. I'm here."

  He opened his eyes. A gummy smear of pink and brown slowly became Fredericks.

  "I'm dying."

  For a moment his friend looked frightened, but Orlando saw him push it down. "No, you're not, Gardiner. You've just got the flu or something."

  Oddly, watching Fredericks decide to say something encouraging, despite the unlikeliness of it being true, made him feel better. Any hallucination in which Fredericks acted so much like Fredericks was pretty much as good as real life. Not that he seemed to have a lot of choice anyway.

  The chills had subsided at least for the moment. He sat up, still holding the cloak tightly around himself. His head felt like it had been boiled until his brains had turned to steam and hissed out. "Did you say something about an island?"

  Relieved, Fredericks sat down next to him. With the oddly sharp focus of someone whose fever is in remission, Orlando noted the brisk, bearlike clumsiness of his friend's movements.

  He certainly doesn't move like a girl. The actual fact of Fredericks' sex was beginning to recede into the distance. For a moment, he wondered about what Fredericks—Salome Fredericks—really looked like, then he pushed the thought aside. Here he looked like a boy, he moved like one, he said to treat him like one—who was Orlando to argue?

  "I think this is. An island, I mean. I was looking in
case there was some way to get a boat—I thought I could even steal one, since I seem to be Pithlit right now. But there's no one here but us." Fredericks had been staring out at the amusement-park intricacy of the city just across the water, but now he turned back to Orlando. "Why am I Pithlit anyway? What do you think is going on?"

  Orlando shook his head. "I don't know. I wish I did. Those kids were going to take us to meet someone, then they said something about a 'big hole to somewhere,' and that they were going to 'hook us up.' " He shook his head again; it felt inordinately heavy. "I just don't know."

  Pithlit waved his hand in front of his own face, frowning as he watched it. "I've never heard of anywhere on the net like this. Everything moves just like in real life. And there are smells! Everything! Look at the ocean."

  "I know."

  "So, what do we do now? I say we build a raft."

  Orlando stared at the city. Seeing it so close, so . . . actual . . . he had misgivings. How could anything that solid-looking live up to all the dreams he had invested in it? "A raft? How are we going to do that? Did you bring your Mister Carpenter Tool Kit?"

  Fredericks made a disgusted face. "There's palm trees and vines and stuff. Your sword's lying right over there. We can do it." He scrambled across the sand and picked up the blade. "Hey. This isn't Lifereaper."

  Orlando stared at the simple hilt, the bare blade so naked compared to Lifereaper's rune-scribed length. His burst of energy was wearing off, his thoughts dulling at the edges. "It's my first sword—the one Thargor had when he first came into the Middle Country. He got Lifereaper just about a year before you came in." He looked down at his sandaled feet sticking out from beneath the cloak. "I bet there isn't any gray in my hair either, is there?"

  Fredericks examined him. "No. I've never seen Thargor without a few streaks of gray. How did you know?"

  He was feeling very tired again. "Because these sandals, the sword—I'm the young Thargor, when he first came down from the Borrikar Hills. He didn't get the gray hair until the first time he fought Dreyra Jahr, down in the Well of Souls."

  "But why?"

  Orlando shrugged and slowly lowered himself back to the ground, ready to surrender again to the soft tug of sleep. "I don't know, Frederico. I don't know anything. . . ."

  He slid in and out of sleep as light turned into darkness. Once he was pulled almost completely to wakefulness by someone screaming, but the sound came from far away and might have been another dream. There was no sign of Fredericks. Orlando wondered dimly if his friend had gone off to investigate the noises, but his thoughts were clotted with fatigue and illness and nothing else seemed very important.

  It was light again. Someone was crying, and this noise was close by. It made Orlando's head hurt. He groaned and tried to fold his pillow over his ears, but his grasping fingers were full of sand.

  He pulled himself upright Fredericks was kneeling a few feet away, face in hands, shoulders shaking. The morning was bright, the virtual beach and ocean made even sharper and more surreal by what was left of the night's fever.

  "Fredericks? Are you all right?"

  His friend looked up. Tears were streaming down the thief's face. The simulation had even reddened his cheeks, but most impressive of all was the haunted expression in his eyes. "Oh, Gardiner, we're so locked." Fredericks caught at a hitching breath. "We are in bad, bad trouble."

  Orlando felt like a sack of wet cement "What are you talking about?"

  "We're trapped. We can't go offline!"

  Orlando sighed and let himself slump back onto the ground. "We're not trapped."

  Fredericks crawled swiftly across the intervening distance and grabbed his shoulder, "Damn it, don't give me that! I went off and it almost killed me!"

  He had never heard his friend sound quite so upset. "Killed you?"

  "I wanted to go offline. I was getting more and more worried about you, and I thought maybe your parents were out somewhere and didn't know you were sick—like, you might need an ambulance or something. But when I tried, I couldn't unplug. I couldn't make any of the usual commands work, and I couldn't feel anything that isn't part of this simulation—not my room, not anything!" He reached up to his neck again, but this time more carefully. "And there's no t-jack! Go on, you try!"

  Orlando reached up to the spot where his own neurocannula had been implanted. He could feel nothing but Thargor's heavy musculature. "Yeah, you're right. But there are simulations like that—they just hide the control points and make the tactors lie. Didn't you go on Demon Playground with me once? You don't even have any limbs on that—you're just neural ganglia strapped into a rocket sled."

  "Jesus, Gardiner, you're not listening, I'm not just guessing—I went offline. My parents pulled my jack out And it hurt, Orlando. It hurt like nothing I've ever felt—like they'd pulled my spine out with it, like someone was sticking hot needles into my eyes, like . . . like . . . like I can't even tell you. And it didn't stop. I couldn't do anything but . . . but scream and scream. . . ." Fredericks stopped, shuddering, and could not speak again for a few moments. "It didn't stop until my parents put the jack back in—I couldn't even talk to them!—and, bang, I was back here."

  Orlando shook his head. "Are you sure it wasn't just . . . I don't know, a really bad migraine or something?"

  Fredericks made a noise of angry disgust "You don't know what you're talking about. And it happened again. Jesus, didn't you hear me screaming? They must have taken me to a hospital or something, because the next time it came out, there were all these people standing around. I could hardly see, it hurt so bad. But the pain was even worse than before—the hospital gave me a shot, I think, and I don't remember much after that for a while, but here I am again. They must have had to plug me back in." Fredericks leaned forward and gripped Orlando's arm, his voice raggedly desperate. "So you tell me, Mister Golden City—what the hell kind of simulation acts like that? What have you gotten us into, Gardiner?"

  The hours of daylight and night that followed were the longest Orlando had ever spent. The fever returned in full strength. He lay thrashing in a shelter Fredericks had built from palm fronds, freezing and burning by turns.

  He thought his subconscious must be acting out Fredericks' story of escape and forced return, because at one point he heard his mother speaking to him, very clearly. She was telling him about something that had happened in the security estate—the "Community" as she called it—and what the other neighbors thought about it. She was prattling, he realized, in that very particular way she did when she was scared to death, and for a moment he wondered if he was dreaming at all. He could actually see her, very faintly, as though she stood behind a gauze curtain, her face leaning in so close that it seemed distorted. He had certainly seen her that way often enough to make it a feature of a dream.

  She was saying something about what they were going to do when he got better. The desperation in her tone, the doubt behind the words, convinced him that dream or not, he should treat it as real. He tried to make himself speak, to bridge the impossible distance between them. Mired in whatever it was, hallucination or incomprehensible separation, he could barely force his throat to operate. How could he explain? And what could she do?

  Beezle, he tried to tell her. Bring Beezle. Bring Beezle.

  She fell away from him then, and whether it was only another phantasm of his febrile sleep or an actual moment of contact with his real life, it was gone.

  "You're dreaming about that stupid bug," Fredericks growled, his own voice clumsy with sleep.

  Bug. Dreaming about a bug. As he slid back into the dark waters of his illness, he remembered something he had read once about a butterfly dreaming it was an emperor, wondering if it were an emperor dreaming he was a butterfly . . . or something like that.

  So which is real? he wondered groggily. Which side of the line is the real one? A crippled, shriveled, dying kid in some hospital bed . . . or a . . . a made-up barbarian looking for an imaginary city? Or what if someone completely
different is dreaming . . . both of them. . . ?

  All the children at school were talking about the house that burned down, it gave Christabel a funny feeling. Ophelia Weiner told her that a bunch of people got killed, which made her feel so sick she couldn't eat her lunch. Her teacher sent her home.

  "No wonder you're feeling bad, honey," her mother said, a hand on Christabel's forehead, checking for a temperature, "Up all night like that, and then having to listen to all those kids telling stories about people dying." She turned to Christabel's father, who was on his way to the den. "She's such a sensitive child, I swear."

  Daddy only grunted.

  "No one got killed, honey," her mother assured her. "Only one house burned and I don't think there was anyone in it."

  As her mother went off to wave her some soup, Christabel wandered into the den where her father was talking with his friend Captain Parkins. Her father told her to go outside and play—as if she hadn't been sent home from school sick! She sat down in the hall to play with her Prince Pikapik doll. Daddy seemed very grumbly. She wondered why he and Captain Parkins weren't at their office, and wondered if it had anything to do with the big bad secret thing that had happened last night. Would he find out what she had done? If he did, she would probably get punished forever.

  She pulled Prince Pikapik out of the nest of pillows she had made him—the otter doll tended to scramble toward dark, shadowy places—and scooted closer to the door of the den. She put her ear against the crack to see if she could hear anything. Christabel had never done that before. She felt like she was in a cartoon show.

  ". . . A real goddamn mess," Daddy's friend was saying. "After all this time, though, who'd have guessed?"