City of Golden Shadow (85 page)

Beezle sat motionless, looking for all the world like the discarded head of a mop. For a moment Orlando thought he had gone past the bounds of the agent's gear. "Do you think it's stupid?" Beezle asked at last.

"Don't mirror back what I say." Orlando was exasperated. That was the cheapest kind of artificial-life programming trick-when in doubt, answer a question with the same question. "Just tell me-in your opinion, is it stupid or not?"

Beezle froze again. Orlando had a sudden pang of worry. What if he had pushed it too hard? It was only software, after all. And why was he asking a piece of gear something like this, anyway? If Fredericks were around he would be telling Orlando just how utterly he scanned.

"I don't know what 'stupid' means in this context, boss," said Beezle finally.

Orlando was embarrassed. It was like forcing someone to admit in public that they were illiterate. "Yeah, you're right. Go see if you can find that phone number."

Beezle obligingly dropped out of sight once more.

Orlando settled back to think of something to do to occupy the time while Beezle did his work. It was about four in the afternoon, which meant he only had a little while until Vivien and Conrad came home and he had to surface, so he couldn't afford to get into anything too complicated, like gaming. Not that he had any particular urge to get involved in any games at present. The golden city, and the several layers of mystery that surrounded it, had made chasing monsters in the Middle Country seem a bit of a waste of time.

He created a screen in the middle of his room and began flicking through net nodes. He browsed for a while in Lambda Mall, but the idea of actually buying anything made him feel depressed, and nothing looked very interesting anyway. He jumped through the entertainment channels, watching a few minutes here and there of various shows and flicks and straight commercial presentations, letting the noises and effects wash over him like water. He scanned some news headlines, but nothing sounded worth watching. At last he vanished the elcot, went full surround, and wandered into the interactive sections. After specifying view-only, he watched almost half-an-hour's worth of a program on living at the bottom of the sea until he got bored with floating around like a fish while people demonstrated underwater farming, then began to flick through some of the specialized children's entertainment.

As the nodes flipped by, a familiar, exaggerated smile caught his attention.

"I don't know why they stole my handkerchief," said Uncle Jingle. "All I know is . . . snot fair!"

All the children on the show-the Jingle Jungle laughed and clapped their hands.

Uncle Jingle! Orlando, just about to shift again, paused, dismissed the Who Are You? query that popped up at the ten second mark-he was way too old to sign on, and anyway, I didn't particularly want any attention at the present. Still, Orlando continued to watch, fascinated. He hadn't seen Uncle Jingle for years.

"Snot fair"-man, the scanny things you watch when you're a little kid.

"Well," continued Uncle, bobbing his tiny head, "whatever the reason, I'm going to track that handkerchief down, and when I find it, I think I'm going to teach Pantalona and old Mister Daddywhiner a lesson. Who wants to help me?" Several of the participating kids, promoted out of the daily audience of millions by some arcane selection process, jumped up and down and shouted.

Orlando stared, fascinated. He had forgotten how weird Uncle Jingle was, with his huge toothy smile and tiny black button eyes. He looked like a two-legged shark or something.

"Let's sing a song, okay?" said the host "That'll make the trip go faster. If you don't know the words, touch my hand!"

Orlando did not touch Uncle's hand, and was thus spared the additional indignity of local-language subtitles, but was still forced to listen to dozens of happy childish voices singing about the sins of Jingle's arch-nemesis, Pantalona.

". . . She simply loves to be unfair

That vixen with the corkscrew hair,

She doesn't wash her underwear!

Pantalona Peachpit,

"She tosses stones at little birds

She loves to shout out naughty words

She even eats the doggy's . . . food

Pantalona Peachpit. . . !"

Orlando grimaced. He decided that, after a childhood spent in the opposite camp, his sympathies were beginning to shift to Pantalona, the Red-Headed Renegade.

Uncle Jingle and his entourage were now dancing and singing down the street past The Graffiti Wall, headed for a rendezvous with the lost handkerchief and vengeance against Uncle's enemies, Orlando, nostalgia more than satisfied, was just about to shift to something else when a slogan on the simulated wall caught his attention-painted letters that read Wicked Tribe-Rooling Tribe. Orlando leaned forward. He had thought that with his one Indigo favor called in, he was out of connections to TreeHouse, and through TreeHouse to the mystery of the gryphon and whatever light that might shed on the radiant, magical city. But here, here of all places, was a familiar name-a name that, properly followed, might get him back into TreeHouse.

It had been a long time since he had been a regular fan of Uncle Jingle's Jungle, and he had forgotten more than simply why he had liked it in the first place. There was some routine for posting a message, but he was damned if he could remember it. Instead, he pointed at Bob the Ball, the chuckling sphere that always bounced along through the air just behind Uncle Jingle. After he had pointed long enough for it to register as more than a casual gesture, Bob the Ball appeared to burst open (although none of the other viewers would see that, unless they, too, were requesting help), disgorging a number of pictographs designed to help Uncle Jingle's young audience make choices. Orlando found the one that concerned Making New Friends, and entered his message: "Looking for Wicked Tribe." He hesitated for a moment, then left a dead drop address for contacts. There was no immediate answer, but he decided to stay connected for a while, just in case.

"Oh, look!" Uncle Jingle did a little dance of pleasure, his long tuxedo coat flapping. "Look who's been waiting for us at the Bridge of Size! It's the Minglepig! But, oh, look! The Minglepig is big, big, big!"

The entire company of the Jingle Jungle Krew, along with an invisible worldwide audience, turned to look. Already as large as a house and growing larger by the second was the Uncle's friend and erstwhile pet, the Minglepig, an amorphous aggregation of dozens of porcine legs, trotters, snouts, eyes, and curly pink tails. Orlando felt a moment of recognition as he saw for the first time in its wriggling outline the roots of his own Beezle Bug design, but where he had once found the Minglepig thrillingly funny, he now found its centerless squirming unpleasant.

"Never spend too long on the Bridge of Size!" declared Uncle Jingle as seriously as if he were explaining the Second Law of Thermodynamics. "You'll get real big or you'll get real small! And what's happened to Minglepig?"

"He's big!" shouted the Jingle Jungle Krew, seemingly un-fazed by the anemone-like mass that now loomed over them like a mountain.

"We have to help him get small again." Uncle looked around, his licorice-drop eyes wide. "Who can think of something to help him?"

"Stick a pin in him!"

"Call Zoomer Zizz!"

"Tell him to stop it!"

"Make him go to the other end of the bridge," suggested one of the children at last, a little girl by the sound of her, whose sim was a toy panda.

Uncle nodded happily. "I think that's a very good idea. . . ." Uncle needed a split-second to call up the name, ". . . Michiko. Come on! If we all shout it at once, maybe he'll hear us-but we have to shout loud because his ears are very high up now!"

All the children began to screech. The Minglepig, like a particularly grotesque parade float losing its air, flattened itself toward the ground, listening. At the children's direction it moved a little way back along the bridge, but then stopped, confused. The Krew began to scream even more shrilly; the din became excruciatingly painful. Wicked Tribe or not, Orlando had reached his limit. He entered his message so that it would continue to appear on the Making New Friends band, then exited Uncle Jingle's Jungle.

"Orlando!" Someone was shaking him. "Orlando!"

He opened his eyes. Vivien's face was very close, full of concern and irritation, a combination Orlando was used to seeing. "I'm okay. I was just watching a show."

"How can you not hear me? I don't like that at all."

He shrugged. "I was just concentrating and I had it up pretty loud. It was this really interesting thing about farming in the ocean." That ought to hold her, he figured. Vivien approved of educational programs. He didn't want to tell her that, since he hadn't set the t-jack to keep a line open for normal external input-that is, stuff going from his actual ear to his auditory nerve-he hadn't heard her, any more than he would have if she'd been shouting his name in Hawaii.

She stared, dissatisfied, although she was clearly not sure why. "How are you feeling?"

"Sore." It was true. His joints had already been aching, and Vivien's energetic wake-up hadn't helped any. The painblocker must have worn off.

Vivien pulled a pair of dermals from the drawer beside the bed, one for pain, the other his evening anti-inflammatory fix. He tried to put them on, but his fingers ached and he fumbled them. Vivien frowned and took them from him, applying them with practiced skill to his bony arms. "What were you doing, plowing the bottom of the sea yourself? No wonder you're hurting, thrashing around on that stupid net."

He shook his head. "You know I can turn off my own muscle reactions when I'm online, Vivien. That's the great thing about the plug-in interfaces."

"For the fortune they cost, they'd better do something." She paused. Their conversation seemed to have moved through its usual arc, and now Orlando expected her either to shake her head and leave, or seize the chance to offer a few more dire predictions. Instead, she sat herself on the edge of the bed, careful not to put weight on his legs or feet "Orlando, are you scared?"

"Do you mean right now? Or ever?"

"Either. I mean. . . ." She looked away, then determinedly returned her gaze to him. He was struck for the first time in a while by how pretty she was. There were lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but she still had a firm jaw and her very clear blue eyes. In the dim afternoon light, with day fast fading, she looked no different from the woman who had held him when he was still young enough to be held. "I mean . . . it isn't fair, Orlando. It's not. Your illness shouldn't happen to the worst person in the world. And you're not that at all. You may drive me crazy sometimes, but you're smart, and sweet, and very brave. Your father and I love you a lot."

He opened his mouth, but no sounds came.

"I wish there was something else I could tell you, besides 'be brave.' I wish I could be brave for you. Oh, God, I wish I could." She blinked, then kept her eyes closed for a long moment. One hand stretched out to rest lightly on his chest. "You know that, don't you?"

He swallowed and nodded. This was embarrassing and painful, but in a way it also felt good. Orlando didn't know which was worse. "I love you, too, Vivien," he said at last. "Conrad, too."

She looked at him. Her smile was crooked. "We know that being on the net means a lot to you, that you have friends there, and . . . and. . . ."

"And something like a real life."

"Yes. But we miss you, honey. We want to see as much of you as we can. . . ."

"While I'm still around," he finished for her.

She flinched as though he had shouted. "That's part of it," she said finally.

Orlando felt her then in a way he hadn't for some time, saw the strain she was under, the fears that his condition brought. In a way, he was being cruel, spending so much time in a world that to her was invisible and unreachable. But now, more than ever, he had to be there. He considered telling her about the city, but could not imagine a way he could say it that wouldn't make it sound stupid, like a sick kid's impossible daydream-after all, he couldn't really convince himself it was anything other than that. He and Vivien and Conrad already walked a very difficult line with pity; he didn't want to do anything that would make things more difficult for everyone.

"I know, Vivien."

"Maybe . . . maybe we could put aside some time every day to talk. Just like we're talking now." Her face was so full of poorly hidden hope that he could barely watch. "A little time. You can tell me about the net, all the things you've seen."

He sighed, but kept it nearly silent. He was still waiting for the painblocker to take effect, and it was hard to be patient even with a person you loved.

Loved. That was a strange thought. He did love Vivien, though, and even Conrad, although sightings of his father sometimes seemed as rare as those of other fabled monsters like Nessie or Sasquatch.

"Hey, boss," said Beezle into his ear. "I think I got something for you."

Orlando pushed himself a little more upright, ignoring the throbbing of his joints, and put on a tired smile. "Okay, Vivien. It's a deal. But not right now, okay? I'm feeling kind of sleepy." He disliked himself more than he usually did for lying, but in a funny way it was her own fault. She had reminded him how little time he truly had.

"Fine, honey. You just lie down again, then. Do you want something to drink?"

"No, thanks." He slid back down and closed his eyes, then listened to her close the door.

"What do you have?"

"I got a phone number, for one thing." Beezle made the clicking noise he used to indicate self-satisfaction. "But first I think you got a call coming in. Something named 'Lolo.' "

Orlando shut his eyes, but this time left his external auditory channels open. He flicked to his 'cot and opened a screen. His caller was a lizard with a mouth full of fangs and an exaggerated, artifact-strewn topknot of Goggleboy hair. At the last moment, Orlando remembered to turn up his own volume so he could whisper. He didn't want to bring Vivien back into the room to check on him.