02. The Shadow Dancers (36 page)

Addison smiled and nodded to Carlos and Aeii, who seemed real pleased, as well they should be. This was one
hell
of a plot.

We had a
long
walk in the Labyrinth after that, the longest I ever remembered. The switches and tracks had shortcuts to help long distances, but we was still talkin' hours and hours of cubes and more cubes, weird landscapes and more weird landscapes. After a while, Carlos and Aeii handed off the bag to Addison after takin' out their own guns and left us. It was just us three now, but somehow that made me feel better, not worse. Addison's fury at Monroe had been real; she had a temper, but I think in her own way she had a sense of honor. I wasn't none too sure the other pair did.

Finally we turned and entered the damndest tunnel in the whole thing I
ever
saw.

All the scenes on all four cube walls for the longest distance was exactly the same. We was lookin' out on some broad grassy range and off in the distance you could see a fellow on horseback. But each scene was just slightly different as you walked through. It was fascinatin'. First of all, the man and the horse was never in the same exact place. Second of all, sometimes the grass was tall, sometimes short, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and sometimes there was other trees and sometimes there wasn't. The man and the horse and the scene all changed. After a while, that horse seemed to be a purplish thing and the guy on top began to look more and more like some kinda horror movie freak and less and less like a man. Unfortunately, the scene ran out before I could get a real clear look at them, but I got to tell you it was unnervin'.

We was now in Type One territory, and it was weird all 'round. Once they set up a region, they blacked out the worlds they didn't use or want to look at generally and now there was only the occasional scene here or there, almost never with people. You couldn't see much, anyways; they was careful that their stations would always be concealed, so what we'd seen with that horse and rider was some real thin weak point, a natural thing. Now we was back to just stations, and they was as blacked out mostly as the unused worlds.

We stopped in stages at certain worlds, mostly Company setups, I figured, where there was survival shacks, basic Type Zero food and water, and the like. There was also a
separate area we could see that looked all crazy and had stuff you wouldn't touch on a bet-Type One stuff. These was worlds like the one we'd left, worlds where people of any kind just never got invented, and they used 'em as rest stops on the inter-world highway. At the first one, Addison pulled out these little necklaces that looked sorta like red pearls, one for each of us. "Put these on," she ordered us, puttin' one on herself. "They contain small broadcast units that contain randomly shifted identity codes while leaving the security clearance intact. They will mask your much weaker identity signals and make it impossible to trace us from this point."

Another question answered. Anytime somebody tells you a system's foolproof, all it means is that you are protected from fools.

They said that pulpweed juice didn't travel, but I guess that's 'cause the folks where it come from never got 'round to inventin' vacuum-sealed storage containers or some-thin', 'cause Addison had it and 'cause we didn't get no high, damn it, we didn't even slow 'em down.

We actually took a sleeping period at one of them rest areas. 1 didn't mind, but I was real surprised that a revolutionary band this well connected hadn't been able to con no vehicle. What the hell-what did we have the right to complain about, anyways? The last thing I wanted to think anything about was the future.

We took three days, judgin' from the sleep periods and the doses of weed juice, before we got near the place. I lost count of the cubes, worlds, switch points, and rest areas. Finally, though, we entered the world at a force point.

It was a right pretty-lookin' place, but not real homey. More like the kind of background you see in all them old John Wayne westerns. Lotsa colors, mesas, rock steeples, and-what do they call them things?-buttes. Never was clear what a butte was, but they had 'em.

The temperature was cool but not cold, maybe high sixties. The sky looked a little bluer than I thought it should be, and I didn't remember no John Wayne movies with green rocks, and blue ones, too, but this place had 'em. It also had little clumps of growths here and there, of sickly purple grasses and clumps of this odd-lookin' plant that had
a base like a pale blue cabbage and thick purple stalks growin' out of 'em with round pale pink balls on the ends. The skin and balls looked sorta
metallic,
and as you walked all the colors of the sun seemed to ripple off 'em, like lookin' sideways at a pane of glass in summer.

"This is
it?"
I commented. "Looks kinda
lonely
to me."

"Looks kinda yucky to me," my twin put in.

"There are better places, but this is the only force point developed," Addison told us. "There's a small settlement about fifty kilometers-about thirty miles-that way. An old trail leads down the cliff side here to the bottom, where there's a small river. Follow the river against the stream and you'll hit it. Most of the vegetation is that violet color; plants here use a different system of making food from sunlight than ours do. Don't let it throw you off. Most anything the people here eat, you can eat, and I doubt if the symbiont will let you eat wrongly. The bulk of the Type Zero colony, perhaps a half dozen people, live near the village. You won't have any trouble finding them. The natives are generally friendly and will mostly ignore you unless you do something to provoke them. They're not very pretty to look at, but we aren't that pretty to them, either, and it
is
their world. Go down to the colony. They'll fill you in and get you settled. They'll understand your problems, too. They've all been hooked on this stuff for years."

"That's it?" my twin asked. "You just drop us here and that's the end?"

"That's about it. When I leave, this forcer will be set to open only from the Labyrinth side. It might be quite some time before anyone comes for you. It might well be many years, depending on how smoothly this goes and how many

problems the takeover and restructuring of the Company first and then my people goes, but eventually someone will come. In a week, no more, I will be like you, and Addison will be no more, so this is farewell."

"Seems to me you're makin' the biggest sacrifice of all," I noted. "Is it really worth that much? Do you really believe that your people are gonna be any better than the ones now?"

She swallowed hard. "I am not eager for this. Who is eager to die? But I would take a dagger and strike my chest
and remove my own heart and crush it if that is what it would take to topple this abomination. I don't know if we will be better rulers than we have now; no one can fully predict the future. I do know that they could not be any worse, and that radical change in a society that has never changed since gaining power will collapse it, force it to rebuild, and along different lines. I will have the necklaces back, please, now. You can keep the dresses and sandals, although no one here cares much if you run nude all the time. The climate here is mild, and if you get a chill you can make your own. This is enough time. Farewell."

We handed her the necklaces, but we wasn't gonna let her get away scot-free. "Wait a minute!" Brandy Two called to her. "You ain't left no juice or weed or nothin'! How do we even know this is the right world?"

She turned. "I would not have brought you all this way just to fool you. Ask your twin. There are many easier places I could have dumped you with far less time and trouble."

"That's true 'nuff," I agreed.

"As for the fix, you won't need it anymore. That round plant with the stalks is the rainbow weed. It grows like wildfire. You'll find it delicious." She pushed the forcer, got a crude cube, and stepped into it. It collapsed almost immediately.

"Can you
believe
her?" my twin commented. "Damn! We spend all that damned time prayin' for the day when the color of your skin don't mean a thing, and we find out that even if everybody was the same color and beautiful, people would
still
figure out a way to divide and hate each other!"

"It
do
give you some discouragement," I agreed. "Damn it, I guess we got a long climb down and a thirty-mile run 'fore we know if we're just a pair of conned turkeys or if we got a future at all."

"Shouldn't we hang around awhile, just in case?"

I shook my head. "Uh uh. We don't know if them necklaces didn't screw up this whole bit, but if they did we're better off findin' folks and seein' what this place is like. If not, they'll find us. Besides, in order to really wrap this up, I wanna talk to them humans stuck here. Besides, don't you remember her sayin' that some of 'em was men? They been havin' to live with rank amateurs all this time.

Maybe us trained professionals can put a little spice in their lives."

We was able to find the trail without much lookin'; it was well worn and well used. Well, I supposed they had to get the damned juice up to this point somehow and fairly regular.

Thirty miles was more than a marathon run, and sure as hell impossible in a sari and sandals. The river was fairly wide but real shallow and there was a flat, worn area all along this shore. More of the trail, we supposed, since off and on we saw some real ugly-lookin' animal shit. Leastwise, we
hoped
it was animal turds. Either that or this world's dudes was
really
huge 'nuff to shit bricks. Purple and orange ones, too.

I don't know if the juice was feelin' at home or not, but it really felt good to run; we paced ourselves but ran for hours before we stopped, and even then we was just startin' to work up a real sweat. The rainbow weed was all over the place, wherever there was sunlight, and we found ourselves just pullin' it up and eatin' the balls and the big round head. I guess it weren't enough, 'cause the juice also had us eatin' grass like we was some kinda cows or somethin', and drinkin' long and hard from the river. It filled us up, though, but also made us kinda drowsy, and 'long 'bout sundown we just found a patch of grass and collapsed. 'Bout the only thing my twin said before we was both dead to the world was, "I ain't sure I like the menu, but we sure as hell won't starve none here."

Which were, of course, my thoughts exactly.

Next day we made real time, and broke outta that badlands and into broad fields. It took a minute to realize that a lot of the landscape was just like the stuff we saw where we come in, only now it was covered in violet and purple and shimmering colors. The path kept on beside the river, sometimes broken by small streams and creeks flowin' in, but we just splashed through 'em. There was clouds in the sky now, and they looked pretty normal; big fluffy cotton balls that made shadows on the ground.

The trail also had several junctions, but we kept to the river path. Hell, that's what we was told to do. Finally, we come in sight of civilization, or what passed for it in these parts. A big clump of what looked like giant mounds or
maybe beehives with pointy tops, only made of clay and mud and rock and havin' openin's and ladders and steps. Before we reached it, though, we met our first inhabitant.

He
was
big, in every sense of the word. Built like a wrestler, with big, round eyes, the biggest, flattest nose I ever seen, and skin that was kinda shiny and glitterin' like fish scales. He had big, muscular arms and bigger feet and he needed a manicure somethin' awful. He also had a flowin' mane of thick, curly, dark purple hair and a beard maybe a foot long. He was wearin' a kinda sleeveless dark brown tunic and a knee-length skirt or kilt, but I doubt if there ever was the Einstein what could make shoes for them feet. The hair was about the same color as the grass.

He started talkin' to us, gesturin' wildly, making the damndest gruntin' and blowin' and bellowin' we ever heard, which we took to be the way these dudes talked. It took a couple minutes for us to realize that he didn't even know we was newcomers; he was spoutin' off to us 'bout somethin' like we met every day.

"I guess we all look alike to them, too," Brandy Two noted.

We finally got this big bruiser calmed down enough to take a breath. We tried to show we didn't understand him, come from up there, and was lookin' for our own kind. It was crude, but he turned put to be a bright fella at that and pointed a long, pointy-nailed finger further on, then cocked it. We figured that meant take the next right, so we thanked him and went on.

Any other circumstance I'd'a been scared to death of that creature, but here it almost seemed normal. At least now we knew what the people were like who got permanently married to a virus and a plant.

"I wonder if our hair's gonna turn purple," I muttered. Anything was possible now.

The new trail we took was less used, but still plain enough, and led pretty quick to a small single one of them beehive type huts with two even smaller ones behind. There was a small creek runnin' right beside the property, and in the field was two creatures that looked like hairy purple elephants with no trunks and tails like them old dinosaur pictures.

We slowed down, not sure this was the place, when we saw two women 'bout as pregnant as you can get sittin' outside, naked as we was, sucklin' a couple of little babies. That stopped me. I just hadn't figured on babies.

One was the golden type, the other was darker and built different, not black but maybe Latino. They saw us, and did a real take, then the Latin woman called to us in some language that sounded as bad as old scales and bellow, only more human. "Uh oh," I muttered. "We forgot 'bout the language thing. Bet Addison did, too."

Well, they all started comin' 'round to us after that, and others come out of the houses or in from the field. There was three women, three men, and seven kids, the oldest of which looked maybe two and a half. A man and woman was of the golden people variety, another couple was this Latino-lookin' type, and a third couple was deep-tanned white, he with real blond hair and blue eyes and she with reddish-brown hair and green eyes.