River of Blue Fire (19 page)

“Why are you here?” It was Fredericks who asked this time. “And where did you learn to do those things you did to Orlando? Are you a doctor or something?”

“I have some medical training, but I am not a doctor. It is enough to say.”

“But why are you here?” Orlando prompted.

“All these questions!” Florimel's sim face drew its eyebrows together in a fierce frown. “I am here because a friend became ill. You may ask more questions, but you will get no more answers.”

Orlando turned to the man in black. “And you?”

“You know all you need to about me, chuck. How did BangBang, in his infinite wisdom, put it—'My name, my fame?' Well, this is what you get—this name, this face. And just because you've contracted some exotic, soap-opera illness and we're all sorry for you doesn't get you any more than that.” The teasing edge of Sweet William's normal tone was gone. He and Florimel both appeared ready to fight rather than to divulge more about themselves.

“Well, it's better than nothing, I guess. So now what do we do?” Orlando turned his gaze out to the roiling green river. “Go downstream? And if we're going back on the river, how? Our boat, the leaf—it sank.”

“Perhaps we should try to find Renie and her friend,” said Quan Li. “They may need our help.”

“I hardly think that a bunch of people the size of orange pips should waste too much time wandering around searching for
other
tiny people who may or may not be there in the first place,” declared William. “You lot might enjoy being eaten by something, but I like my pleasures, especially the masochistic sort, more refined.”

“We need to stay close to the river, don't we?” Fredericks asked. “That's how we get out of this place and into another simulation.”

“Well, I'm all in favor of getting out of this place, as fast as frigging possible,” William said.

“First smart thing, you.” T4b nodded vigorously. “Let's get flyin'. Don't want no more
sayee lo
fish-swallowing, me.”

“Just like that?” demanded Orlando, outraged. His own vulnerability had made him sensitive. “We just take off, and maybe leave Renie and her friend hurt, or lost?”

“Look, sweetness,” William growled, “first off, you are going to have to learn the difference between real life and one of your action-adventures. For all we know, they're dead. For all we know, some horrible earwig the size of a bus may come around the corner any second and pinch all our heads off, and
we'll
be dead, too. Really dead. This is not a hooray-for-elves! story.”

“I
know
it's not a story!” But even as he spoke, Orlando regretted that it wasn't. If he were really Thargor, and this were the Middle Country, it would be time for some serious smiting. “That's the point. We're in trouble. Renie and her friend are in this with us. And in case you didn't notice, there aren't a whole lot of us to spare.”

“I think what Orlando says makes sense,” Quan Li offered.

Fredericks and T4b now joined the argument, although it was hard to hear what either was saying in the general din. Orlando fought an urge to stick his fingers in his ears—were
any
of these people grownups?

“Stop!” Martine's voice was hoarse. The others paused, halted as much by the evident pain beneath her words as what she was saying. “Perhaps we can find some sort of compromise. We will need a boat, as Orlando has said. Perhaps some could begin building such a boat, while others looked for our two missing friends.”

“
Dzang
, yeah. I can work on a boat,” said Fredericks. “I did it when we were on the island. It worked, too, didn't it, Orlando?”

“Oh, sure. It stayed above water for nearly half the trip.”

Fredericks rewarded him with a punch on the shoulder.

“That is fine,” said Martine. “For me, I feel that I should be among those searching for the others. I would be little help with building.”

Quan Li volunteered to accompany her, as did Florimel. After much argument, Sweet William and T4b decided to help gather material to build the boat. “After all,” William pointed out, “there's not a lot of difference between getting eaten up while searching or getting eaten up while doing construction.”

“We will return before the sun goes down,” Martine promised.

“Yes, but if you do come back after dark,” William said, “try not to make noises like a giant bug or we might stick you with something sharp by accident.”

Building the raft of reeds with Fredericks had been one thing—Orlando had been deathly ill through most of that process, and what little work he had done, Fredericks had directed. Now he felt himself again, and found he was part of a very fractious four-person committee. Fredericks wanted to build another raft, but William pointed out—quite correctly, Orlando had to admit—that even a large raft was not going to be heavy enough or deep-bottomed enough to keep them afloat on the river. At their size, even the river's milder moments of choppiness would be like a terrible storm at sea. But Fredericks proved stubborn, as he often did. He felt that the raft experiment had worked once—although, as Orlando had earlier pointed out, even that conclusion depended on how you read the data—and that they did not have the equipment or materials to build anything more complicated. Orlando had to agree with him on the latter point.

The disagreement rapidly degenerated into a bout of mutal recriminations until T4b accidentally made the best suggestion of the afternoon and a plan began to develop. During the course of one shortlived moment of calm discussion, the robot Goggleboy said that what they really needed was their old leaf back. A few minutes later, when Orlando had given up for a bit on mediating between Fredericks and Sweet William, and was staring up at the vast trunk of a tree looming over the riverbank like a cylindrical cliff-face, T4b's words came back to him.

“Hold on,” he said. “Maybe we
do
need our leaf back. Or another leaf.”

“Sure we do,” William said, rolling his eyes. “And at the first thumping it will go over, just like the last one, and we'll all swim the rest of the way back to the real world. Won't that be fun?”

“Just listen. We could make a raft, like Fredericks said, but put it
inside
a leaf—like a deck. That would give it some . . . what do you call it?”

“Kitsch value?” suggested William.

“Structural integrity. You know, it would brace it. And then we could make some outriggers, like they have on Hawaiian canoes. Pontoons, is that the word? That would keep it from tipping over.”

“Hawaiian canoes?” William smiled despite himself, Pierrot lips quirking at the edges. “You truly are a mad boy, aren't you? What, do you spend all your time living in fantasy worlds?”

“Think it's good, me,” said T4b suddenly. “Make one sixing boat, no dupping.”

“Well, maybe.” William raised an eyebrow. “Pontoons, is it? Suppose there's no harm trying it. No harm till we drown, that is.”

The sun was high overhead, already past the meridian and heading for its setting point somewhere on the far side of the river. Orlando was discovering how far he still had to go before he'd be at even his normal level of fitness. The tactor settings were either simply lower here, or some of Thargor's more superhuman characteristics didn't translate into the Otherland network. Certainly the barbarian's famous indefatigability was absent: Orlando was dripping with virtual sweat and exhausted by very real aches in every joint and muscle.

Fredericks was not any more cheerful, or at least his sim face looked red and uncomfortable. He stood up from where he was forcing in the last crossbeam, wedging it into the leaf by using a piece of sand big as his two fists as a hammer-stone. “We're ready for the mat, now.”

Orlando gestured to T4b, then climbed gingerly over the edge of the leaf and down onto the beach. They had chosen a smaller leaf than the one that had brought them here, but even so it had taken them a large part of the morning just to drag it down to the river's edge, and Orlando felt as if he had been chopping with his sword for days to cut enough of the bamboolike grass shoots to weave the frame.

William, piecing together the last fibers of the coarse mat, had been forced to saw the tiny shoots used in its manufacture with a jagged stone, and did not seem to have enjoyed his task, either. “Whose bloody idea was this?” he asked as Orlando and T4b trudged up. “If it was mine, take this heavy thing and hit me with it.”

Orlando no longer had the strength or breath for jokes, even the stupid ones that had helped him through the hard work earlier. He grunted, then bent and grabbed one edge of the mat. After a moment, T4b leaned over with an answering groan and found a handhold of his own.

“Oh, for God's sake, you sound like a couple of Tasmanian washerwomen.” William struggled up from his seated position and walked to the far side. “You pull, I'll push.”

Together they wrestled the mat over the curled edge of the leaf; then, with a great deal of swearing, shoved it more or less into place.

“Finished, true?” asked T4b hopefully.

“No.” Fredericks sucked his lower lip thoughtfully. “We need to tie this down. Then we need to cut something long enough to make Orlando's pontoons.”

“They're not
my
pontoons,” Orlando growled. “
I
don't need any damn pontoons. They're for the boat.”

William rose, a pitch-black scarecrow, his tassels and fringes fluttering in the breeze off the river. “You two tie the mat down. I'll go look for some more bloody reeds to make the outrigger thingies. But when you get done resting, Orlando my chuck,
you
can come cut them down. You're the one who brought a sword to the picnic, after all.”

Orlando nodded a weary assent.

“And why don't you come with me, BangBang,” William continued. “That way if something with too many legs comes sneaking up on me, you can bash it with your big metal fists.”

The robot shook its head, but rose unsteadily and limped after the departing death-clown.

Orlando watched them go with something less than complete satisfaction. Sweet William was right about one thing, anyway: if this were an adventure game, Orlando could have relied on allies with definable and helpful powers-swiftness, agility, strength, magical abilities. As it was, except for Martine's new input, the group's only real skills seemed to be at dressing funny.

He slumped, waiting for the inevitable summons from Fredericks, but in no condition to anticipate it. A pair of giant flies swooped and barrel-rolled like vintage planes above a bit of drying something-or-other a short way up the beach. The noise of their wings made the air vibrate until it was almost impossible to think, but there was a kind of beauty in them, too, their glossy bodies rainbowing as they caught the sun, their swift-beating wings an almost invisible iridescence.

Orlando sighed. This whole Otherland thing locked, basically. If it were a game, the rules would be defined, the moves to victory comprehensible. Games made sense. How had little Zunni from the Wicked Tribe put it? “
Kill monster, find jewel, earn bonus points. Wibble-wobble-wubble
.” Not much like real life, maybe, but who wanted real life? Or even this bizarre variation? No rules, no goals, and no idea even of where to begin.

“Hey, Gardino, are you going to sit there working on your tan, or are you going to help me finish this?”

He stood, sighing again. And what had they learned so far, that would take them any closer toward their objectives? That they were trapped in the Otherland network, somehow. That they needed to stay alive until Sellars could get them out again. That somewhere, in one of who could guess how many simulations, a guy named Jonas was running around, and Sellars wanted them to find him.

“A needle in a haystack the size of a locking galaxy,” Orlando muttered as he clambered onto the leaf.

Fredericks frowned at him. “You shouldn't sit in the sun so long. You're getting woofie in the head.”

Another hour had passed, and none of the others had returned. The sun had sunk behind the pinnacles of the trees, throwing vast fields of early night across the riverbank. The leaf-boat lay in one of them, and the local weather was almost chilly. Orlando, grateful for the relief, was dragging another long reed back toward the boat, for use as a barge pole in shallower waters, when something big came hissing out from under a pile of stones. Fredericks shouted a horrified warning, but Orlando had already seen the dark blur at the corner of his vision. He threw himself sideways, rolled, and came up without the reed, but with his sword in his hand and his heart hammering.

The centipede was at least a half-dozen times as long as Orlando was tall, dusty brown and covered with bits of crumbling earth. It came toward him in strange, sidewinding fashion, forcing him to give ground. Except for movement, it was hard to distinguish the creature from the background; Orlando was grateful there was still a little daylight left.

A shudder ran through the creature, a ripple of its armor plates, and for a moment the centipede's entire front end lifted from the ground. Orlando thought he could see pistoning spikes just below its mouth, and had a sudden, maddeningly distant memory that these creatures were poisonous. The front limbs dropped and the beast rushed forward on dozens of segmented legs, bearing down on him like a fanged monorail. Orlando could hear Fredericks shouting something, but he had no attention to spare. Years of Thargor-experience rolled through him in half a second. This was not the kind of high-bellied creature you could get under, like a gryphon or most dragons. But with all those legs, it would strike sideways very quickly, perhaps faster than he could matador out of the way.

With a noise like a small stampede, the centipede was on him. Orlando sprang from a crouch even as the thing's front legs tried to hook him toward its mouth. He clambered up onto the head, then had time enough for one stabbing blow to what he hoped was the creature's eye before it kinked in fury and threw him to the side. He landed heavily and scrambled back onto his feet as quickly as his throbbing muscles could manage. Fredericks was atop the leaf, watching in agony, but Orlando could think of no way his friend could help him without weapons.