River of Blue Fire (86 page)

Fredericks shouted something back, but Orlando could not hear it. He grabbed his friend by the sleeve and together they staggered toward the Nile, first leaning into the piledriving wind, then tumbling when it switched direction and pushed them from behind. They had started only a few steps from the river, but after a minute or two had passed with nothing beneath their feet except for the slithering, unforming dunes, Orlando knew they had somehow turned in the wrong direction.

His makeshift
keffiyeh
was pulled so tight he could barely breathe, but without it he would be blinded in seconds. This was doing them no good at all, he realized—if they went farther, they might lose the river entirely. He caught Fredericks by the shoulders and turned his friend toward him, pressing his forehead against Fredericks' so he could be heard over the roaring of the wind.

“We missed the river!” he shouted. “We have to stop and wait it out!”

“I can't . . . I can't breathe!”

“Pull your hood over your mouth!” Orlando let go of his own flapping head-cloth for a moment to help. “Just keep it like that, and keep your eyes closed! You'll still get air!”

Fredericks said something that was almost entirely muffled by wind and his hood. Orlando thought it might have been, “I'm scared.” He knelt, pulling Fredericks down, then clung to his friend and pulled Fredericks' forehead against his neck, hugging him, struggling to keep his balance against the furious wind and the needle-sharp sprays of sand.

They remained that way for what seemed like hours, a clumsy, fourlegged structure, holding together with panicked ferocity, their faces pressed into each other's shoulders. The sand sprayed them like a shotgun blast, and burned like rock salt where it found exposed flesh. The wind howled on and on; Orlando thought he could hear voices in it, condemned spirits and lost souls wailing like abandoned children. At one point he even heard his own mother's voice, weeping and trying to call him home. He clung to Fredericks and told himself it was all imaginary, knowing that to take even a step away from his friend might mean death for both of them. At last the storm blew itself out.

With dwindling strength, they dragged themselves down to the river, which turned out to be only a few yards away—sand-blinded, they had been stumbling along parallel to its course—and washed the dust and blood from their abraded skin. Then they crawled back onto the bank and fell asleep in the full late afternoon sunlight. Orlando woke long enough to rub mud on his legs, which even with Thargor's dark tan were beginning to feel as though they were being broiled, then he slid back once more into a vertiginous and unrestful sleep.

“Everything, everything hurts,” Fredericks groaned. The sun had dipped behind the western mountains, and although the sky along that horizon was now the same spectacular color as the desert itself, the heat was much less. The first few stars were agleam in the darkening sky. “We need to rest tonight, Gardiner. I don't think I can walk.”

Orlando scowled. He was exhausted, too, aching in every muscle and across every inch of skin. He hated having to be the drill-sergeant. “We can't rest. If we stay here all night, what happens in the morning? The same thing all over again, but twice as bad. I don't know if I can even make it another day without some shelter to get out of the sun.” The first chill of evening—still a warm summer night in any other environment—had set him shivering again. “So get up. Come on, or we'll be locked majorly.”

Fredericks let out a great sigh of misery, but did not argue. He climbed shakily to his feet, wincing and moaning, and fell in behind Orlando as they began to follow the course of the river.

“So if this isn't the real Egypt,” Fredericks rasped after some time had passed, “where are we going?”

“Out of here.” Talking split his cracked lips. His legs and head throbbed, and his sunburned, sandblasted skin felt like it had been scoured with a wire brush. For the first time in a long time, it hurt as much to be Thargor as it did to be Orlando Gardiner in RL. “We need to find another way out of here—one of those doors, or gates.”

“Do you mean we're walking all the way to the end of the river?” If Fredericks had been in better shape, his voice would have quivered with outrage. As it was, he just sounded horribly depressed.

“Only if we have to. There should be some other way out. I don't believe the people who built these places have to go all the way through them every time.”

Fredericks lumbered along beside him in silence for a long moment. “Unless they can just pop in and out anywhere they want. You know, because they're members or whatever.”

Orlando pushed this depressing possibility away. He owed something to Renie and the others—and to Sam Fredericks, too. He wasn't going to die in some imaginary desert. Whatever his own story was, it couldn't end like that. It just . . . couldn't.

“We'll find a way out.”

When the moon had already passed across the night sky and vanished, perhaps an hour before the sun's return, they found another set of ruins, a cyclopean tumble of stones on a bluff overlooking a wide spot in the river. He and Fredericks found a spot where one massive stone had fallen against another, leaving some small distance between the wide rock faces, and crawled into the gap to sleep.

If Orlando dreamed, he did not remember any of it when he woke in late afternoon with the sun beating down on the sand a few inches away and his head pillowed against Fredericks' leg. After going down to the river to splash themselves with lukewarm Nile water, they drowsed in the shady refuge of the ruins until the sun finally dropped behind the western mountains once more and they could resume their journey.

It was a little easier going the second night, if only because they were better rested, but it was still a mean, joyless trudge. The stars, despite a certain animation they did not display in RL—at times the constellations almost seemed to arrange themselves in the moving, living shapes of humans and animals—were still out of reach, and a night desert was no more interesting than the daylit variety. Somewhere after midnight, Fredericks began singing some dreadful summer-camp song whose main feature was adding a single item to the contents of a suitcase every verse before running through the entire list from beginning to end, and by the time he had reached
a tse-tse fly, round rocks, Jewish rye, padlocks, a bow-tie, some old socks, blueberry pie, three clocks, Dad's left eye, a young fox, octopi, and a small black box
, Orlando was ready to murder his companion and bury his despicable, campsong-singing body under the ubiquitous sand. His exasperated scream ended the recitation.

Fredericks arched his eyebrows. “What's
your
problem, scan-master?”

“Could you do something besides sing that song?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Talk to me. Tell me something.”

Fredericks tramped beside him for a while in silence. The sand rasped and crunched beneath their feet. “Something like what?”

Orlando made a noise of frustration. “About your school, about your family, about anything—just don't sing. What do you do when you're not on the net? Girl things? Boy things?”

Fredericks frowned. “This another one of your what-are-you-really conversations, Gardiner?”

“No. But if it were
me
who was a girl pretending to be a boy,
you'd
want to know what it was all about, wouldn't you?” He waited for an answer, but an answer did not seem to be coming. “Wouldn't you?”

“Maybe.” Fredericks shot him a quick glance, then returned to contemplating the featureless dunes. “I don't know, Orlando. What do I do? Just . . . things. I play soccer. I hang around. I used to play
BlueBlazes Collective
all the time. . . .”

“I said when you're not on the net.”

“Not much. That's why I'm on the net a lot. The kids where I go to school, they're all doing sex and stuff. Passing around chargers in the restroom. Doing ultravile interactives. Talking about the parties they're gonna have when their parents go out of town. And they listen to all this utterly slumped music. It's just . . . boring. They don't read or anything—not even as much as I do!” Fredericks made a face for effect: it was a standing joke between them that Fredericks thought only a mutant could read as much text as Orlando did. “They don't talk about anything real.”

To Orlando, whose few offline friends were other chronics with whom he had shared hospital support groups, this seemed as wild and fascinating a group of options as the jet-setting life of an international master spy, but he tried to make sympathetic noises.

“That's why you're my best friend, I guess,” Fredericks went on. “I mean, you were more interesting than all those impacted idiots, even though I never met you.” Fredericks walked another two dozen paces before adding, “—of course, if I had known this was the kind of place I'd wind up, I probably would have been better off doing T2 chargers with Petronella Blankenship.”

It was meant as a joke, but surrounded at they were by miles and miles of featureless, moon-silvered sand, it carried a certain sting.

They made camp just after dawn in a tiny oasis comprised of a few date palms and some low, scrubby bushes. As the Nile began to shift from black to a metallic blue, they fell asleep huddled against the west flank of a fallen palm. They were awakened at mid-day by another sandstorm, which not only stung them with choking sand, but shifted enough landscape to reveal that they had been sharing the oasis with the corpses of three camels. The beasts, on closer inspection, proved to be really only camel-shells, since insects and other scavengers had long since devoured everything but bones and skin, and the desert air had then cured the latter so that they still seemed stuffed with the original goods. Orlando found it an incredibly depressing sight, and forced Fredericks to begin their nightly march even before the failing sun had reached the western horizon.

The trek across the sands had now become a familiar but no less miserable routine. The hours seemed to ooze past. Fredericks no longer sang, not even to annoy Orlando.

When the heat began to rise even before the sun had appeared above the eastern mountains, Orlando knew they were going to be in for a bad day. There was no obvious shelter in sight, no trees, no convenient ruins. He and Fredericks decided to dig in.

They scraped a pit for themselves in the damp sand close to the river. When they had dug down a foot or so, they shored the walls of the excavation as best they could with small stones, then Fredericks took off his robe. They lay down side by side, then stretched the robe over the top of their shelter and waited for sleep. Already the early morning sun was beating on the fabric, and despite the river-moisture seeping from the walls, the pit was beginning to warm.

Fredericks managed to fall asleep fairly quickly, as he usually did. Orlando was not so lucky. Sweat dripped into his eyes and pooled on his chest. Sleep would not come. His brain could not let go of things.

They had been walking for days now, but he could see no particular effect in relation to the distant hills. He half-wondered if he had jinxed them by suggesting twenty thousand miles of desert. Perhaps the system had heard him and adjusted itself accordingly. . . .

Fredericks shifted against him, rubbing skin on sweat-soaked skin. Orlando was uncomfortably aware of his friend, who was naked but for a loincloth, and felt confused and oddly shamed. Fredericks was wearing the thin, male body of Pithlit; his chest, while small around the rib cage, was unquestionably male. And yet, even though how the sim was dressed had no bearing on what the real Fredericks was wearing, it was hard not to remember that at least in some sense, this was Salome Fredericks, an actual girl, lying half-naked beside him.

But Fredericks thought of himself as a boy, at least when he was online. So what did that make Orlando at this moment, shrinking away from more contact with his friend's virtual flesh because it made him so uncomfortable—because it excited him? Straight? Queer?

Desperate
, Orlando told himself.
I'll probably never have sex with anyone unless I pay for it, VR or RL. And time is running out on that particular project, anyway
.

There was a certain type of hero for whom virginity was a source of great power. Given a choice, Orlando hadn't really wanted to be that kind of hero.

He didn't sleep well through the long, hot day. The pit was like a sauna, his mind unquiet. When they clambered out onto the river-bank at nightfall, Orlando felt tired and not very well. Within the first mile, he began to wonder whether he could get through the night's walking.

Fredericks recognized that something was wrong, and although Orlando snappishly refused help several times, his friend adjusted his pace so that Orlando wouldn't have to struggle too hard to keep up. It was hard to disguise this, and for Orlando it was almost worse than falling behind.

He wasn't exactly sure what the problem was. His joints ached, but that was normal for him. He felt hot, but after another hellish desert afternoon, the evening air was still warm enough to make both friends sweat as they waded through the unstable sands, so there was nothing surprising there. The worst thing was that he could not seem to get enough air into his lungs. No matter how deeply he breathed, there always seemed to be pockets of carbon dioxide in the bottom of his chest he could not shift, and he was running out of energy before he had even reached the next inhalation.

He had stopped for perhaps the two-dozenth time, and was bent double, leaning on his knees, struggling to draw in air. “Bad, huh?” Fredericks asked. There was a nervous quaver to his voice he could only partially hide.

Orlando nodded. The effort made him cough, and for a moment fireworks exploded across the blackness of his closed eyelids. Even after he opened his eyes again, the night sky swam and sparkled. “Yeah. Bad . . .”