City of Golden Shadow (96 page)

"We'll talk about it, Orlando." His mother's tone unmistakably told him not to embarrass her by being a stubborn little bastard in front of this nice young man. "Thank you, Doctor Doenitz."

The doctor smiled and bobbed his head, then sauntered out of the examining room. Watching him go, Orlando wondered if he'd gone to some special creepy suck-up-to-rich-patients school.

"If Doctor Doenitz thinks you belong in the infirmary. . . ." Vivien began, but Orlando interrupted.

"What are they going to do? It's pneumonia. They're going to give me contra-bees just like the other times. What difference does it make where I am? Besides, I hate that place. It looks like they had some horrible person come in and decorate it so the rich jerkies who come here would feel like when they get sick it's not like normal people getting sick."

A smile tugged at the corner of Vivien's mouth, but she did her best to suppress it. "No one's saying you're supposed to like it. But this is your health we're talking about. . . ."

"No, it's whether I'm going to die from pneumonia this time, or from something else next week or next month." The brutality of it silenced her. He slid off the examining table and began pulling his shirt on. Even that effort made him feel weak and short of breath. He looked away, determined to hide how miserable he felt. Otherwise, the whole thing would be too much like a bad flick.

When he turned, she was crying, "Don't talk like that, Orlando."

He put his arm around her, but at the same time he was angry. Why should he be comforting her? Who was living under the death sentence, anyway?

"Just get me the drugs. The nice pharmacy woman will give them to us and we'll add them onto my pile. Please, Vivien, let's just go home. They say that making the patient feel comfortable is important. I won't be any better off in that stupid infirmary."

Vivien wiped her eyes. "We'll talk to your father about it"

Orlando levered himself back into the wheelchair. He did feel pretty impacted, feverish and slow, bubbling a little at every breath, and he knew he didn't have the strength right now even to walk back across the Crown Heights Medical Center to the car, let alone to their house half a mile away across the complex. But he was damned if he was going to get stuck in their damned infirmary. For one thing, they might try to keep him off the net-nurses and doctors got some idiot ideas sometimes, and now of all times he couldn't afford that risk. He'd had pneumonia twice before and survived, although it had never been fun.

Still, as Vivien pushed him down the corridor toward the pharmaceutical department-the Patch Ranch, as Orlando called it-he couldn't help wondering whether this might not really be it. Perhaps he had already walked somewhere on his own for the last time. That was a horrible thought. There ought to be some way to tell when you were doing something for the last time so you could appreciate it. An announcement crawling along the bottom of your vision, like when you had the news ticker running on the net. Fourteen-year-old Orlando Gardiner of San Mateo, California, has just eaten ice cream for the last time in his life. His last laugh is expected sometime next week.

"What are you thinking about, Orlando?" his mother asked.

He shook his head.

The city stood before him, golden, thrilling, impossibly tall towers shimmering with their own inner light. The only thing he truly wanted waited for him within that thicket of brilliance. He took a step toward it, then another, but the gleaming spires wobbled and disappeared. Cold wet darkness was suddenly all around him. A reflection! He had lunged at a reflection in the water, and now he was drowning, choking, filling up with black fluids. . . .

He sat up, his breath rattling in his lungs. His head felt like a hot balloon.

"Boss?" Beezle whirred in the corner, detaching himself from the power outlet.

Orlando waved his hand, struggling to get air past the phlegm. He thumped himself on the chest, then coughed. He bent over, feeling the blood rush into his throbbing skull, and spat into the medical wastebasket.

"I'm okay," he wheezed when he got his breath back. "Don't want to talk." He pawed his t-jack off the bedside table and clicked it into the neurocannula.

"Are you sure you're okay? I could wake up your parents."

"Don't you dare. I just . . . I had a dream."

Beezle, who had very little in his programming about dreams other than the ability to access literary and scientific references, did not reply to this. "You had a couple of calls. Do you want to hear the messages?"

Orlando squinted at the time, superimposed on the upper right of his field of vision and glowing blue against the shadowy drapes beyond. "It's almost four in the morning. Who called?"

"Fredericks, both times."

"Tchi seen! Okay, return the call."

Fredericks' broad-faced sim appeared in the window, yawning broadly but still somehow looking nervous. "Jeez, Gardino, I figured I wasn't going to hear back from you tonight."

"Well, what is it? You aren't going to back out on me, are you?"

Fredericks hesitated. Orlando felt a stony weight in his stomach, "I . . . I was just talking to some people at school yesterday. And this guy they know, he got arrested for breaking into some local government system-it was a prank, basically, just tap-and-nap-but they threw him out of his academy and gave him three months in one of those juvenile re-edge holes."

"So?" Orlando turned down the gain on his voice line so he could cough up more phlegm. He didn't feel up to this. He didn't have the strength to keep pushing ahead by himself-didn't Fredericks see that?

"So . . . so the government and the big carriers are really cracking down right now. I mean, it's a bad time to be messing around with other people's systems, Orlando. I don't want to . . . See, my parents would. . . ." Fredericks trailed off, oxlike face showing a sort of blank concern. For a moment, Orlando hated him or her.

"And when would be a good time? Let me guess-never?"

"What is this, Orlando? I asked you before-why is this city or whatever you saw so damned important? I mean, you signed up to go work for some gearhouse for years, just so you could try to get a little closer to this thing."

Orlando laughed sourly-Indigo Gear had as much chance of getting blood from a billiard ball as years out of him. Then the anger suddenly evaporated, leaving behind only a vacuum-like emptiness. Here, in his dark room, with his parents only yards away and his friend on the other end of the line, he suddenly felt completely and utterly alone.

"I can't explain," he said quietly. "Not really."

Fredericks stared. "Try."

"I. . . ." He took a breath, grunted. When it came down to it, there was no way to explain, not really. "I have dreams. I dream about that city all the time. And . . . and in the dreams I know there's something there, something important that I have to find." He took another pinched breath. "Have to."

"But why? And even if you . . . if you do really have to find this place, what's the hurry? We just got thrown out of that TreeHouse network-shouldn't we wait for a little while?"

"I can't wait." After he'd said it, he knew that if Fredericks asked, he would explain everything. The words hung in the air as though he could see them, as though they glowed in the night shadows like the clock numerals.

"Can't wait?" Fredericks said it slowly, sensing something.

"I'm . . . I'm not going to live very long." It was like taking off your clothes in public-frightening, but then a kind of chilly freedom. "I'm dying, basically." The silence stretched so long that if Orlando had not been able to see his friend's sim, he would have thought that Fredericks had clicked off. "Oh, come on, say something."

"Orlando, I'm . . . Oh, my God, really?"

"Really. It's not a big deal-I mean, I've known about it for a long time. I was born with . . . well, it's this genetic thing. Called Progeria. You might have heard about it, seen a documentary. . . ."

Fredericks said nothing.

Orlando had trouble getting his breath. The silence hung, an invisible and painful bond between two bedrooms three thousand miles apart. "Progeria," he said at last. "It means you get old when you're still young."

"Old? Like how?"

"Every way you can think of. Lose your hair, muscles shrink up, you get wrinkly and bony, and then you die of a heart attack, or pneumonia . . . or something else that kills old people. Most of us don't make it to eighteen." He tried to laugh. "Most of us-hah! There's only about two dozen people who have this in the whole world. I guess I should be proud."

"I . . . don't know what to say. Isn't there medicine?"

"There's not much you can say, Frederico old buddy. Medicine? Yeah, like there's medicine for growing old. Meaning they can slow it down a little bit, which is the only reason I'm still alive-hardly any Progeria cases even used to reach their teens." Orlando swallowed. There it was, all exposed. Too late to take back. "Well, now you know my dirty little secret."

"Do you look. . . ?"

"Yeah. As bad as you'd imagine. Let's not talk about it any more." His head was hurting worse than before, a throb like someone was squeezing it in a hot fist. He suddenly wanted to cry, but he wouldn't let himself, even though the intervening, normal-looking, no-Progeria sim would hide it from Fredericks. "Let's . . . let's just drop it, okay?"

"Orlando, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah, life's tough. I want to be a normal boy-and so do you, at least the online kind. I hope at least one of us gets a magic Christmas wish, Pinocchio."

"Don't talk like that, Orlando. You don't sound like yourself."

"Look, I'm tired and I don't feel good. I gotta take my medicine now. You know when those little kids are meeting me. If you want to be there, be there." He broke the connection.

Christabel waved her hand. The beam of light leaped up from the Official Uncle Jingle's Jungle Krew Klok, projecting the numbers on the ceiling. Christabel waved her hand in front of Uncle Jingle's eyes, hurrying before his recorded voice shouted out the time. She only wanted the quiet part of the clock right now.

00:13, the numbers read. Still a long time to go. Christabel sighed. It was like waiting for Christmas morning, except scarier. She waved her hand through the beam and the numbers disappeared, leaving her bedroom dark again.

She heard her mother's voice in the living room, saying something about the car. Her father answered, deep and grumbly so she couldn't understand any of the words. Christabel scrunched down and pulled the blanket up under her chin. Listening to her parents talking when she was in bed usually made her feel safe and warm and cozy, but right now it only made her feel frightened. What if they didn't go to sleep, even when it was 02:00? What would she do?

Her father said something else she couldn't hear and her mother replied. Christabel pulled the pillow over her head and tried to remember the words to Prince Pikapik's song in Ottertown.

For a moment she didn't know where she was. She had been having a dream that Uncle Jingle was chasing Prince Pikapik because the Otter Prince was supposed to be in school. Uncle Jingle had been smiling his big crazy smile, getting closer and closer to Pikapik, and Christabel had been running toward him, trying to tell him that Prince Pikapik was an animal, so he didn't have to go to school. But no matter how fast she had run, she didn't get any closer, and Uncle Jingle's smile was so big and his teeth were so bright. . . .

It was very dark, then it wasn't. There was a light flashing on and off. Christabel rolled over in bed. The light was coming from her Storybook Sunglasses where they lay on the carpet next to her dresser. She watched the lenses blink, then go dark a couple of times, and then she remembered.

She sat up in bed with her heart beating really fast. She had fallen asleep! The one thing she hadn't wanted to do! She swiped her hand over the clock and the numbers sprang onto the ceiling: 02:43. Late! Christabel flung back her blankets and scrambled out of bed toward the Storybook Sunglasses.

"So you wanna know what time it is?" shouted Uncle Jingle. He was muffled by the blanket that had accidentally fallen in front of his mouth, but his voice still seemed like the loudest thing she had ever heard. Christabel squeaked and pulled the blanket away, then waved her hands in front of his eyes before he could yell out the time. She crouched in the darkness and listened, expecting any moment to hear her parents getting out of bed.

Silence.

She waited a little longer, just to make certain, then crept across the floor to her blinking glasses. She put them on and saw the words "CHRISTABEL I NEED YOU" sliding past, over and over again. She turned the sunglasses on and off, like Mister Sellars had told her to do last time, but the words "CHRISTABEL I NEED YOU" just kept going past.

When she had put on the clothes and shoes she had hidden under the bed, she took her coat from the closet, moving it slowly so the hangers didn't rattle, then opened the bedroom door and tiptoed out into the hallway. Her parents' door was a little bit open, so Christabel went past with the silentest tiptoe she could do. Her father was snoring, snkkkk, hrrrwww, snkkkk, hrrrwww, just like Mister Daddywhiner. Mommy wasn't making any noise, but Christabel was pretty sure she could see her, a sleeping lump just on the other side of her father.

It was funny how different the house looked at night with no lights on. It seemed bigger and much, much scarier, as though it turned into a whole other house after everyone went to bed. What if there were strangers who lived in her house, she suddenly wondered-a whole family, but they were night-time people who only came home after Christabel and her mother and father were in bed? That was an awful thought.

Something made a noise, a kind of thump. So frightened she felt cold, Christabel held herself very still, like a rabbit she had seen on a nature show when a hawk went by overhead. For a moment, she even thought it might be the night-time people, that a big man, an angry daddy-but not her daddy-might suddenly jump out of one of the dark corners, yelling Who's this bad little girl? But then she heard the noise again and realized it was just the wind bumping the weather-blinds against the windows outside. She took a deep breath and hurried through the wide-open living room.