The Very Best of Tad Williams (15 page)

Not that he isn’t pretty tame already
, Orlando thought.
Luckily for everybody.

The protector of the woods listened to Orlando’s news with grave concern, nodding his huge head sadly. “But I just saw Omby Amby last night,” he growled. “He was right here in Forest.”

“Do you know why, exactly?” Orlando asked.

“He had been to see Tinman and brought a message for me. Scarecrow asked the Works not to make so much noise at night, so Tinman wanted to know if he could expand some of his factories into land on the edge of Forest.”

“And what did you say?”

“About that idea? That I’d have to think about it. I wanted to talk to Scarecrow, too. I don’t see why my people should give up their territory without getting anything back, and we don’t like noisy machines, either.”

“And it was Omby Amby who you gave that message to?”

Lion frowned, his furry brow wrinkling like crumpled velvet. “I told him what I thought—that it was a serious issue and nothing to rush into.” He raised his head and sniffed the wind. “Why do you ask? Did Omby Amby talk to Tinman? Did he tell him what I said?”

“We have no way of knowing,” said Orlando. “I haven’t spoken to Tinman yet.”

“Ah. Then you came to me first?” Lion seemed to like that. “Well, if he didn’t get the message already, tell my tin friend I won’t be hurried into a decision. I have my subjects’ welfare to think of, you know.”

“Of course.” Orlando suspected there wasn’t going to be much more to be gained here. “Thanks for your help.”

“I hope you find out what’s going on,” said Lion. “I know Ozma will be very upset. She was very fond of the Soldier with Green Whiskers.”

Princess Ozma, like Oz itself, was now unused strings of code sleeping in the original specs of the simworld, but Orlando certainly wasn’t going to mention that.

He called to the Glass Cat, who had disappeared somewhere. When she finally sauntered back into the clearing, Lion said, “Say, Glass Cat, you get around. Do you know anything about what happened?”

“I found the body,” she said. “Nobody else did. Just me. It’s because of my superior brains. You’ve noticed them, of course.”

Lion shared a look with Orlando. “We’ve all admired them, Cat. How did you find him? Were you out searching?”

The Glass Cat looked irritated, her version of embarrassment. “Actually it was sort of an accident. I was on my way back from a trip when I saw him.”

The Lion shook his head again. “Someone has done a very bad thing.”

As he and the Cat made their way out from beneath the pleasant insect-humming shade of Forest, Orlando said, “You couldn’t have seen Omby Amby’s body from the road.”

The Cat was silent for a moment. “Very well, I didn’t notice it right away. I heard a noise in the bushes. I thought it might be a mouse. I went to look.”

“Was it Omby Amby? Was the noise from him? Or did you see someone else?”

“How should I know who made the noise?” Now the Glass Cat was genuinely annoyed. “Is it important? I didn’t see anyone else or I would have told you, and when I found him, he certainly wasn’t moving.”

The number of things that could have been rustling through the grasses by the side of a Kansas stream, even in this simulated version, was effectively endless. “You said a trip. Where?”

“Just to see some friends. I’ve been very busy lately, running errands for Scarecrow and the others, and I wanted a little time to myself. I’m very important, you know—they need me for lots of things because Omby Amby was just too slow sometimes.”

“Has there been a lot going on here lately?” Orlando asked as innocently as possible. “Lots of activity? Messages going back and forth?”

“Goodness, yes.” The Cat stopped to smooth her already smooth glass fur with her tongue. “I’ve hardly had time to catch my breath, if I had breath in the first place.
Go tell Scarecrow this! Go ask Tinman that!
Sometimes it’s quite overwhelming.”

“And are any of the messages...strange?”

The Cat gave him an odd look. “As far as I’m concerned, man from Oz, they’re
all
strange. But that’s just me. Because I have a much better than average set of brains.” She leaned her head forward to better display the cluster of pink pearls glistening in her transparent head. “You already know that, of course.”

“I’m sure everybody knows that by now,” Orlando assured her.

Of all that had changed since Kansas had been rebooted, the Works was the most striking example. The final corruption had been a nightmare of massive gears and steam and dripping oil, with so many wires strung overhead that they blocked out the sky and plunged the place into permanent, sodium-lit twilight. The inhabitants had been either semi-sentient tin toys or mindless human Henrys and Emilys, most with cruel mechanical devices surgically implanted into their bodies. Now the Works looked like something out of one of the real-world Disneylands, all bright, shiny colors and smiling mechanical people marching in and out of cheerful little metal houses. Of course Orlando could not help remembering that those smiles were painted onto their faces.

Not fair,
he told himself.
Everybody in Kansas is a sim, even the most human-looking of them. All the faces in this world have been painted on—by programming, if nothing else.

Still, after experiencing the horrible previous version of the Works, Orlando had never felt quite the same about Nick Chopper again.

man, what was with those grail brotherhood people screwing up perfectly good children’s stories, mr. k? I mean, you knew some of those people—what was their scan?

Kunohara himself had been an early member of the Grail Brotherhood, but only because he wanted access to the powerful simulation engine to pursue his scientific interests. That was how he told it, anyway. But he had helped Orlando and the others take down the Grail Brotherhood, so Orlando trusted him. Didn’t always like him, but trusted him.

i mean, dzang! those old scanners turned the first version of kansas into a nightmare, ruined alice’s wonderland and pooh corner—remember pigzilla?—and a bunch of other stuff besides. didn’t those fenhead bastards ever hear of innocent childlike wonder?

that’s a joke, case you didn’t know. sort of.

“Tell me a bit about Omby Amby,” said Orlando as he and the Glass Cat walked down the main street, past clean, bright tin-fringe lawns and polished mailboxes, toward the Shop, the unofficial city hall of the Works. “Did he have family? Friends—or more importantly, enemies? What did he like to do?”

The Cat shook her head. “No family, but I didn’t know him very well—to be honest, we do not travel in the same circles. If you’ll remember, I am intimate with many of the leading citizens of Kansas and was present to see several of them come to life—like Scraps the Patchwork Girl, for instance. The Policeman with Green Whiskers...well, he was a policeman. A civil servant. You would have to ask around in the workingman’s taverns in Emerald.”

“Taverns?” That didn’t sound very much like the Oz that L. Frank Baum had written about, and it didn’t sound like it belonged in this rebooted version of Kansas either. “There are taverns here?”

“Of course,” said the Cat. “Where else can that sort of people drink ginger beer, play darts, and generally be loud and not half as amusing as they think they are?”

“Ah,” said Orlando. “Ginger beer.”

“Although,” said the Cat with a little frown of disdain, “I hear that nowadays the younger men are drinking sarsaparilla instead. Straight out of the barrel!”

“Goodness,” said Orlando, trying not to smile. “These places sound desperate and dangerous.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the Cat said. “My superior intellect doesn’t permit me to visit such low establishments.”

Tinman was in the barn-like building known as the Shop, standing beside a large drafting table, surrounded by tin toys of various descriptions—a bear on a ball, a monkey with cymbals, a car with an expressive, smiling face. Tinman stared as Orlando explained why he had come, his brightly polished face devoid of any discernible emotion, although his eyebrows had been welded on in such a way that he always seemed surprised, an effect amplified somewhat by the gaping grill of his mouth, as though he were perpetually hearing news as unusual as Orlando’s. Tinman was less human than the drawings in the ancient books, but still a great deal friendlier-looking than the thing that had ruled the Works before the restart, a creature more like a greasy piston with crude arms and legs than anything with thoughts and feelings.

As Orlando finished his recitation of the facts to date, the tin toys standing around the table began to make quiet ratcheting noises and move in place.

“My friends here are upset by your news,” Tinman said tonelessly. “As am I. Poor Omby Amby! He was kind to everybody. He lived to help, and although he was a soldier, he would not have hurt a flea.” He paused for a moment. “Nor would he flee from hurt, evidently.”

The other tin creatures gave little whirring laughs. “Very clever,” the rolling bear said. “Your workings are as droll as ever, Tinman.”

“But now my heart shames me for making light at such a time,” he replied, though Orlando could see no evidence of it on his inscrutable metal face. “What has Scarecrow said? Will he draft another policeman? The whiskered fellow was very useful dealing with small problems and matters of everyday...friction.” It was impossible to tell if Tinman was making another joke or talking about something of particular concern to folk whose internal workings were composed of oiled gears. The tin toys began to whisper among themselves, a noise not much louder or different than the sound of their clockwork, until the monkey became excited and clapped his cymbals together with a loud crash, which startled the Glass Cat so badly that she jumped off the table.

“Careful,” said Orlando.

“You are right,” said the Cat. “Scarecrow was right, too—there are too many hard edges around here for me.”

Tinman swiveled his head toward her. “What does that mean, Glass Cat? Has Scarecrow said something unkind about the Works? That would be very disappointing.”

“No, no,” said the Cat. “Only that he told me I must be careful when I am visiting you here. That all this metal is a threat to my delicate, beautiful glass body.”

“Nonsense,” said Tinman. “No more so than the brick sidewalks of Emerald or the stone-scattered paths of Forest. It is too bad to hear my old friend speak about my part of Kansas that way.”

Orlando was going to say something conciliatory but instead found himself wondering what was going on behind Tinman’s shiny face. Was this exchange really as innocent as it seemed, or had the rivalry, treachery, and ultimately destructive conflict that had ruined the previous version already started again between the leading characters of this simworld?

Orlando asked about Omby Amby’s last mission.

“Yes, he took a message to Lion for me,” said Tinman.

“And you wanted Lion to let you use some of the Forest land?”

Tinman gave the closest thing he could to a shrug, a brief up-and-down pump of his shoulders. “He has a great deal, and there is much of it going to waste, but here in the Works, we are cramped between Emerald on one side and Lion’s domain on the other, with nowhere to grow.”

Lebensraum
, Orlando thought.
Isn’t that what the Nazis called it?
Out loud he said, “Was there anything else to your message? Anything besides the request to use some of his land?”

“I can remember nothing else,” said Tinman. “Now if you will excuse me, my associates and I must discuss an addition to one of our factories. We would like to complete it during the dry season. Many of our laborers are Henrys and Emilys, and unlike my own people, they do not enjoy working in bad weather.”

“Of course,” said Orlando. “We’ll find our own way out.”

As he led the Glass Cat from the Shop, he considered what Tinman had said. On the surface all was as Orlando would have expected, so why did he feel as though something just as important—perhaps many important things—had gone unsaid?

just checked in on tinman. he’s still a little weird, but he always was, even in the nicest versions. something about that voice—like a robot with a bucket over its head. can we just redo the way he talks? that’s probably most of the problem with the simulation right there—that voice is utterly creepy. if sims can dream, I bet he’s giving the others nightmares.

Is this whole world just doomed to go wrong?
Orlando wondered.
Maybe the whole network? Something in the original programming that keeps tipping it back toward chaos? Or am I seeing ghosts where there aren’t any? Maybe Omby Amby just...tripped or something. And his head fell off. Shit, this is Oz, more or less. Stuff like that happens in Oz all the time.

But unless he could prove it, it didn’t solve the current problem. “I guess we’re off to see the Wizard,” he told the Cat.

The Wizard, known in the present version of the simworld as Senator Wizard of Kansas, lived in a stately white house on top of a hill between Emerald and Forest, overlooking the city. He was semiretired, leaving the business of governing mostly to Scarecrow and the others.

Orlando had discovered Oz early, first in various vids, then later in the books themselves. For a very sick child who spent most of his short life in bed, the Land of Oz had been the best childhood dream, a place where even someone as prematurely aged as little Orlando would have been just different, not a freak.