River of Blue Fire (29 page)

Orlando was suddenly very frightened for Fredericks. He hurried forward. As he sprinted past a jar of Captain Carvey's Salts of Magnesia, a groggy voice demanded, “Hark at that! Who goes there? What bell is it?”

There was something odd in his friend's posture, a slump in the shoulders, a rubberiness to the neck, but it
was
Fredericks, or at least the current cartoon version of him. As Orlando drew nearer, slowing because he was afraid he might stumble over something so near to the edge of the dark tabletop, he could hear a faint voice that at first he thought was Fredericks talking to himself. It was barely audible, a murmur that rose and fell, but within a few steps Orlando knew that such a sound could not be coming from Sam Fredericks. It was a deep, harsh voice that hissed its sibilants like a snake.

“Fredericks! Get back from there!” He approached very slowly now, not wanting to startle his friend, but Fredericks did not turn. Orlando put a hand on his shoulder, but there was still no response.

“. . . 
You're going to die here, you know
,” the hissing voice said, now quite clear, although still pitched very low. “
You should never have come. It's all quite hopeless, and there's nothing you can do about it, but I'm going to tell you anyway
.” The laugh that welled up was as ludicrously melodramatic as the chief's snores, but it still set Orlando's heart pattering again.

Fredericks was staring down into the red glow beyond the tabletop, simplified Pithlit-face slack, eyes open but unseeing. Scarlet light glimmered in the depths of the black iron stove, and flames licked at its grille like the hands of prisoners clutching prison bars. But something more substantial than the flames was moving within the stove.

“Hey, wake up!” Orlando grabbed Fredericks' arm and pinched. His friend moaned, but still gazed slackly at the stove and the dancing flames.

“
And there you are
,” the voice crackled up from the stove. “
Come to save your friend, have you? But it won't do any good. You're both going to die here
.”

“Who the hell are you?” Orlando demanded, trying to pull Fredericks away from the brink.

“
Hell, indeed
!” said the voice, and laughed again. Suddenly Orlando could see the shape that had been camouflaged by the flames, a red devil from some ancient book or opera, with horns and a tail and a pitchfork. The devil's eyes widened, and he flashed his teeth in an immense, insane grin. “
You're both going to die here
!” He was dancing in the heart of the stove, stomping up the tongues of fire like he was splashing in a puddle, and although Orlando knew that it was all a simulation, and a particularly silly one at that, it did not stop the rush of fear that ran through him. He grabbed Fredericks firmly and dragged him away from the edge, and did not let go until they were stumbling back toward the teepee.

“
I'll be seeing you again
!” the devil shouted gleefully. “
You can bet your soul on that
!”

Fredericks pulled away from him as they reached the tent door, rubbing his eyes with his balled fists. “Orlando? What's . . . what's going on? What are we doing out here?” He swiveled to examine the now-silent tabletop. “Was I sleepwalking?”

“Yeah,” Orlando said. “Sleepwalking.”

“Scanny.”

The chief was awake, sharpening a huge tomahawk on a stone wheel that had apparently come out of thin air, like so many other things, since it had certainly not been in the teepee before. He looked up from the hail of sparks as they entered. “You awake. That good. Midnight soon.”

Orlando wouldn't have minded a bit more sleep, but each bit of Otherland seemed to have its own cycles of time. He and Fredericks would have to catch up whenever they found a chance.

“I just realized Renie and the rest didn't come through,” he said quietly to Fredericks as the chief and his squaw began packing things into a deerskin bag. “I mean, we would have seen them in the sink, right?”

“I guess so.” Fredericks' expression was morose. “But how could that be? They went through like the same time we did.”

“Maybe there are different levels on the river. Maybe flying through sends you somewhere different than sailing through.”

“But then we'll never find them! They could be anywhere!”

Chief Strike Anywhere stepped toward them and pointed to Orlando's sword. “You have big knife. That good. But you,” he said to Fredericks, “no knife. That bad.” He handed Fredericks a bow and a quiver of arrows.

“Pithlit never uses a bow,” Fredericks whispered. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

“Try to shoot only people that aren't named Orlando.”

“Thanks a lot.”

The chief led them to the tent flap. His wife stepped forward to hold it open. “Find Little Spark,” she said. “Please find.”

She was not in the least like an actual person, but the tremor in her ridiculous pidgin English was real, and Orlando's chill abruptly returned. These people thought they were alive. Even the cartoons! What kind of madhouse were they stuck in?

“We'll . . . we'll do our best, ma'am,” he said, and followed the others out onto the tabletop.

“Jeez,” he gasped. “This is
hard
. I never realized how strong Thargor was.”

Fredericks started to say something, then clamped his jaw shut as the rope swung them out from the table leg, so that for a moment they were spinning over empty darkness. Strike Anywhere had long before outsped them in the downward climb, and they had no idea if he was even still on the rope.

The rope swung back, and after a few unpleasant thumps against the table leg they resumed their careful descent. “I still feel like Pith-lit,” Fredericks said, “but he was never that strong to begin with.”

“I took this stuff for granted,” Orlando said between deep breaths. “Can you see the ground yet?”

Fredericks looked down. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“Tell me you do even if you don't.”

“Okay. Almost there, Gardino.”

A few more minutes did in fact bring them into safe dropping distance. The shadows beneath the table were deep and dark, and they could see the Indian only by the gleam of his eyes and teeth. “Have canoe here,” he said. “We go on river. Plenty faster.”

“River?” Orlando squinted. A curving line of water stretched before them, curiously circumscribed when logic suggested it should have spread into a flat puddle. Instead, it held its shape and flowed merrily by along the floor, past the battlements of the kitchen counter on one side, coiling away past the iron stove in the other direction. Where it passed the red-gleaming stove, the water seemed to steam faintly. Orlando hoped they weren't going in that direction. “Why is there a river here?”

Strike Anywhere was wrestling a birchbark canoe out of the shadows. He emerged from beneath the table, turned the canoe over and put it on his head, then began to carry it toward the gleaming river as Orlando and Fredericks scrambled after him. “Why river?” His voice echoed inside the canoe. He seemed confused by the question. “Sink overflow.” He gestured to where a cataract of water was pouring down the front of the cabinet, pooling at its base, and extending a tongue of river in each direction. For water that was falling such a distance, it did not splash very much. “Sink
always
overflow.”

Orlando decided he was not going to figure out the whys and wherefores of this place so easily; it would be better just to concentrate on what happened next. Still, his Thargor-training made him very uncomfortable with not knowing the ground rules.

Strike Anywhere helped them into the canoe, prestidigitally produced a paddle, and edged the craft out onto the river.

“And who are we following?” Orlando asked.

“Bad men,” the Indian said, then brought a long, unjointed finger to his lips. “Talk quiet. Kitchen waking up.”

It was hard to see anything by the lunar light of the bulb far overhead. Orlando settled back, watching the shadows of counter and cabinets slide past.

“What are we doing this for?” Fredericks whispered.

“Because he helped us. Someone stole his kid.” The memory of Dispose Carefully's tragic eyes seemed an unanswerable argument.

Fredericks apparently did not feel the same way. “This is stupid, Orlando. They're just Puppets!” He lowered his head and spoke into Orlando's ear, unwilling to state this harsh fact loud enough for the Puppet nearest them to hear. “We've lost the only real people, maybe, in this whole impacted place, and instead of looking for them, we're risking our lives for . . . for code!”

Orlando's rebuttal died on his tongue. His friend was right. “It just . . . it just seems like we should do this.”

“It's not a game, Gardiner. This isn't the Middle Country. It's a
whole
lot weirder, for one thing.”

Orlando could only shake his head. His faint and entirely inexplicable belief that they were doing the right thing did not lend itself well to argument. And in fact, he thought, maybe he was just kidding himself. The simple fact of being able to move around without feeling like it would kill him had obscured some of the harsher facts, and he had quickly fallen into the gaming mode of taking any challenge, of building sudden and apparently pointless allegiances. But that was game logic—this, their situation, was not a game. Actual lives were at stake. The people they were contending against were not the Table of Judgment, a claque of moonlighting engineers and role-playing idiot savants. Instead, unless Sellars had made the whole thing up, the masters of Otherland were incredibly rich, powerful, and ruthless. In fact, they were murderers.

And what was Orlando's response to this threat, and to being separated from the only other people who understood the danger? Getting sidetracked into a search for a lost cartoon baby with a cartoon Indian through an animated kitchen. Fredericks was right. It didn't make a lot of sense.

He opened his mouth to admit his own stupidity, but at that moment the chief turned and brought finger to lips once more. “Sssshhhhh.”

Something was bobbing on the water just in front of them. The Indian did not give it a look as he steered the canoe silently past it; his attention was fixed farther ahead. Orlando had time only to notice that the floating object was a waterlogged box, sinking rapidly, and that the faint smudge of words painted on it advertised some kind of floor wax, then his attention was diverted by the sound of slow, labored breathing.

“What's that?” Fredericks asked nervously.

A shape gradually materialized on the river before them—an extremely odd shape. Strike Anywhere paddled forward until they were within a few feet of it, but Orlando still could not make out exactly what was floating on the water beside them. It was a hinged object, like an open oyster shell, but another shape, scrawny and bent, stood inside it, like the famous Venus Orlando had seen in so many advertisements and on so many nodes.

It was some kind of turtle, he realized finally, but it was naked, and standing in its own open shell. Even more ludicrously, it was blowing against the raised half-shell, as though to force itself forward.

“That is so
tchi seen
,” Fredericks murmured. “It's . . . it's a turtle.”

The scrawny figure turned toward them. “I am not,” it said in a dignified but very nasal voice. It produced a pair of spectacles from somewhere and balanced them on the end of its beaklike nose, then examined the newcomers carefully before speaking again. “I am a tortoise. If I were a turtle, I would be able to swim, wouldn't I?” It turned back and blew out another great shuddering breath, but the shell did not move forward even a centimeter. Instead, the canoe slid alongside, and Chief Strike Anywhere backed water to hold them there.

“That not work,” he observed evenly.

“I've noticed,” said the tortoise. “Any other useful comments?” His dignity was more than a little pathetic. Wearing nothing but his baggy bare skin, and with his head wobbling slightly at the end of his wrinkled neck, he gave the impression of an old bachelor caught outside in his pajamas.

“Where you going?” Strike Anywhere asked.

“Back to shore, as quickly as possible.” The tortoise frowned. “Although I would have thought I'd be closer by now. My shell, though water-repellent, does not appear well-suited for river travel.”

“Get in boat.” The chief paddled a little closer. “We take you.”

“Very kind!” The tortoise nevertheless examined him a moment longer. “Back to the land, you mean?”

“Back to land,” the Indian affirmed.

“Thank you. You can't be too careful. A large jar of Great White scouring powder offered me a ride on its back a little earlier. ‘Just grab my fin,' it insisted. But the whole thing didn't feel . . . right, if you know what I mean.” The tortoise stepped from the velvety interior of its shell into the canoe, then leaned back and recaptured the floating carapace. The chief angled the canoe toward the shore at the base of the cabinet.

The tortoise began to step into its shell, then noticed Orlando and Fredericks watching. “It would be a little more polite,” it said carefully, “if you would turn your backs while I dressed. Failing room to do that, you might at least avert your eyes.”

Orlando and Fredericks stared at each other instead, and as the tortoise pulled his outer covering back on, making fussy little noises as he adjusted it, they fought mightily against the laugh that immediately began to bubble between them. Orlando bit his lip hard, and as he felt it sting, suddenly wondered how much of his virtual behavior the suppressor circuits in his neurocannular implant were actually suppressing in RL. Was he biting his real lip right now? What if his family, or the hospital people, were actually listening to all the things he was saying, watching all the things he was doing? They would really wonder what was going on. Or they would think he had scanned out utterly.