It's hot. Beads of sweat splat on the road surface to create little craters that immediately seal over again, just as each footprint erases itself as soon as the foot lifts. There's no trace of their passing, and no route map other than the road itself, self‐constituting, extending five meters ahead at any given time and closing off five meters behind. A charmed ten‐meter wrestling mat, an island of relative safety sweeping them through these outranges. So long as they keep moving.
A sudden breeze blows cool against Cisco's face. He moves on, pursued by the rearward disintegration of his magic carpet. All he hears are muffled squeaks and clanks from their guide and the squeak and scrunch of his own footsteps. Smoke's passage is almost entirely silent. His 'pet remains her usual enigmatic, supremely composed self, except she steps higher, a show cat confident of a blue ribbon or maybe only fussy about the dust. It's strange that this dust is benign while virtually everything surrounding their carpet is ravening. The slowjoe shuffles and lurches along, to all appearances very much a part of that lethal landscape through which they trust it to guide them. Cisco checks his locket, sees the woman is still smiling. He tries to find that reassuring.
Always the test pilot, Cisco keeps assessing this world, which fails on nearly all counts in terms of verisimilitude and—if you overlook the fact that given the chance it will kill you—in terms of intrinsic interest. By comparison with the infinite manifold of Worlds, foaming over with exuberant possibility of experience, Outside is dim. Dimensionless. But it's dense. And navigating this realm is really nothing like worlding. If you screw up here, he reminds himself, you're dead. Stone dead. Outside requires another type of focus, nothing like the greedy rummage of a Worlds‐surfing junky. You have to be another sort of person, prepared to go the whole pot in a game of showdown. No second chances.
All around them, now, the dunes are wavering; dust lifts to shimmer in the rising wind. Ever more menacing, dust tendrils whip at them, especially from the windward side of their carpet.
Their guide stops and turns to them. “Too dangerous,” it suggests. “Stop here.” Then it gestures at Cisco and says, “There.” It sprinkles more magic dust and, indicating a pool of dust off the leeward edge. “Shuck your clothes and lie down. Hurry.”
Cisco is telling the thing to get serious just as one especially substantial tendril snaps out to miss his head by centimeters; a second fails to snag his leg only because his OmniStrike instincts have kicked in.
•
He closes his mouth, covers his nose with a hand, squeezes his eyes shut tight. He sinks, meets with increased resistance before hitting bottom. He didn't get a full lungful of air, and he's starting to stress; but he doesn't dare breathe now. He prickles all over, senses activity, concentrations of blur‐dust on his face, especially around eyes and mouth. He brushes at his face, buried in this dust‐pit, and feels with his feet for secure purchase. He lunges upward, extending his arms above his head to find the lip of the pit. He grabs hold and hoists himself out to hit the ground rolling, gasping, despite himself, for air. He coughs, but his lungs are essentially clear. He doesn't choke. His eyes are still closed. When he touches his body, he finds a thick layer of compacted dust. When he brushes at his face again, he finds denser concretions where his eyes, ears and mouth should be. He looks. Smoke, still on their carpet, still immaculately silver but in soft‐focus through Cisco's blur lenses, is engaged in a fluid dance, wonderfully elaborate, against all odds avoiding the many‐tentacled grasp of the PlagueBot. Then she steps backwards away from the edge of the carpet, raising her paws even higher than is her elegant wont. But it's too late.
“Stop!” the slowjoe says.
“Stay back!” Smoke says, as Cisco lunges to reach for her. An area of the blur mat has already disintegrated, and Smoke begins to founder in the feral dust, dull corrosion racing up her shiny surface as her legs disintegrate, leaving her to wallow on her belly. A moment later, nothing's left but a rusty voice issuing from a rusty head—“…have faith… you”—before it, too, returns to dust.
Their slowjoe companion also made a move towards Smoke as though to rescue her; mind you, Cisco saw the thing make a tossing gesture Smoke‐wards just before the carpet started to break up.
“We're late. We must go now,” the slowjoe says, and, clanking, turns to head off north again, muttering things Cisco can't quite catch.
He's to be allowed no time to mark Smoke's passing. The termination of his only conduit to Sky, if that's what Smoke really was.
Elsewhere
Vector destroyed. Switching to backup. Testing.
Outside
The swirl of dust clears. From her vantage point atop the ridge, she watches Cisco walk away on a patch of something resembling roadway. He's following what looks like a slowjoe. A smaller figure steps high just ahead of Cisco, patently fastidious even at this range. It must be Smoke. How is it they haven't been dissed?
Cisco's pod vanished in a blink. That was immediately after Cisco turned and appeared to look straight at her. She thinks to check behind her, and sees nothing but dust dunes. Her pod has also disappeared. There's an odor of something like ozone, something like smoke, barely discernible, by turns pleasant and unpleasant.
The trio on the patch of road have stopped. One of the larger figures steps off to vanish over the side. My God. Was that Cisco? Next thing, the small Smoke‐figure suffers a strangely graceful fit and also disappears.
But Dee Zu is distracted by events in her immediate vicinity. Most notable among these is the appearance of what can only be fledgling slowjoes. Things as they are, from where she stands, look terminal. Soaring up there on the edge of this world was a piece of cake compared to standing down here awaiting the blurs. Mind and body, sphincter and eyes, she clenches tight against what comes next.
“Strip,” says Toot.
“What?” She looks down to see Toot roll in the dust and then lie still.
The blurs begin to creep up over him. But he isn't being dissed. “Tunic off,” he says. “Lie down and relax.”
She snorts. “No way.”
“Smoke says do it. Please.”
Smoke says do it? That raises questions. Nevertheless, she does what she's told, although there's no way she's going to relax.
“Good luck,” Toot says. And then, after a second: “You could wish me the same.”
Ever so gently, something brushes Dee Zu's skin. Her first thought: it hurts.
Second thought tells her different. It resembles a mild electric shock. A tingling that quickly extends over her entire body. The puzzling thing is, she's still here. And there's no pain. No falling apart. Only this not‐unpleasant buzz. She opens her eyes.
The Toot Thing is largely featureless. “Mmmf,” it says.
“What?” Dee Zu takes a chance and addresses the question to the nearer end.
“Hurry!” Toot sounds at once precious and dire. “Yes. We have to follow Cisco.”
She rises to her knees and looks at herself, raises a lumpish gray member that ought to be an arm. Her arm. But it's a slowjoe arm attached to a slowjoe body standing on slowjoe feet planted there in the dust as she stands. Her slowjoe body on her slowjoe feet. She can see her feet, and her proprioceptors are telling her where they are, but she can't feel the ground very well. She runs a hand over an arm and feels nothing beyond the electric tingle.
“Get down!” Toot advises her, scrunching back down into the dust by way of example. “Quick.”
Looking up, she sees other slowjoes rising from the dunes to the northeast. They begin to advance on her. Gingerly, she kneels on the ground, which is oddly yielding.
“Lower.”
She gets down on all fours, thinks of Tor briefly before looking ahead to see that the slowjoe advance has halted. Toot is nowhere to be seen; he could be almost any one of these little gray mounds. But how can she see anything at all? She's covered with blur dust. Never mind that, how is it she's even alive? Whether it's fatigue, absurdly optimistic relief, or
simply an odd affinity with the blur substrate, she stretches out prone and relaxes. Dust to dust. She turns her head, cheek to ground, a lamb for the slaughter. She cranes around briefly to watch the slowjoes melt back into the dunes. Strange stuff.
Other little mysteries: how does Smoke know what to do, and how can Toot be in contact with Smoke? “Toot,” she says. “If you can talk to Smoke, you can get a message to Cisco, right?”
“Smoke is gone.” “What?”
“Dissed.”
“God!” She hesitates before she asks: “What about Cisco?”
“Don't know. Okay, I think.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes.”
•
Scrabbling knee and elbow, a stubby‐legged lizard following an even stubbier‐legged Toot, Dee Zu crawls roughly towards the place she last saw Cisco standing. She happens to look down at her lumpy slowjoe arm and sees a tiny creature, nearly invisible against the gray stuff. If it hadn't moved, she wouldn't have spotted it. It's a spider. Though she's never seen a real one before, she has to subdue a phobic reaction. This is ridiculous. Aside from the blur bodysuit, she's naked, utterly exposed to Outside, surrounded by dangers she can't even guess at. She's on foot on some part, she has no idea which part, of a blasted planet with the curtain falling on humanity, and here she's afraid of a spider so small she needs to squint to see it. Her laughter is swallowed by her surroundings, and she sobers.
Whether it's the laughter that's triggered it, or whether it was simply ready, the slope of a giant dune ahead of them begins to corrugate. Then the surface slips. At the same time, a subliminal psychic tickle swells to a delicate singing audible even through her new bot ear membranes, a mass chorale of a zillion tiny bells, inspiring sympathetic exfoliation on the part of other dunes, till the whole world becomes elfin song more haunting than drizadrone, ethereal, soon dying away to silence, leaving only its shivering echo in the mind. She laughs again, more softly this time. The music is tingling between her legs.
Cisco claims he has never met a woman so readily turned on by so many surprising things. He says this, inflecting his voice with intimate knowledge of untold numbers of women with stickier triggers. Man of mystery. Except that Dee Zu has known him all his life, most of it, anyway, and it's hard to say where he met all these women. Ebees don't count. Eddie Eight says—used to say—her whole system was geared to resurrect the human race. Single‐handedly, if need be. And if any woman ever beat the anti‐Madonna virus, the current biological moratorium on child conception, it would be her. She thinks of Tor. In a way, she supposes, her thing with Tor isn't that different from whatever's going on between Cisco and this “Sky” person. But she can keep her own little indiscretion in perspective. In no way does it affect her feelings for Cisco. Cisco, on the other hand, gives every evidence of losing his famous distance in this matter.
“Hurry!” says Toot, sounding like Tor with a lisp.
•
From the ridgetop Dee Zu catches sight of what she assumes is a blur‐swaddled Cisco following along behind the other. Only the two of them. Smoke is gone. She sees where they're headed. Then a dust storm blows up to obscure the entire world.
Outside
Gray dunes extend to the horizon in all directions. They stand as much as fifty meters high, spindrift manes streaming off sharply sculpted crests. Cisco watches a squad of dust devils weave and wobble along the leeward slope of one gigantic pile.
His earlier heady sense of space, cautious euphoria at his release from the confines of the mall, threatens to give way to agoraphobia. It's almost a relief when a hazy dust storm rises to obscure their surrounds. The world adopts a soft‐focus anonymity, its bounds an ever‐diminishing magic circle with Cisco and the shaggy slowjoe thing at its center, the slowjoe always several meters ahead of him, and now just within range of vision. Cisco misses Smoke.
The blur dust, Cisco fancies, stings ever so slightly against his face, more a psychological itch at the thought that he could be dissed at any moment. In fact, he doesn't understand why he hasn't been. Here he is, right off the GPS —No data, his WalkAbout tells him—even though he'd always understood there was no place off the GPS. Smoke, his sole friend Outside and his only link with Sky, is gone. And now Cisco finds himself at the mercy of a mechanical robot that looks like a bedraggled slowjoe, following this entity towards what might or might not be Brian the Evil Canadian's lair. Without talking to Sky, or Leary, he isn't even sure what he's supposed to do if he does find Brian. What's happened to this meeting with Sky? He has no idea where Leary is. He's following this whacked‐out robot merely because he has no real alternative. Everyone he's ever known, with the possible exception of Sky, Leary, and Brian, is dead. Dee Zu, Sissie, Lars King, Joy, Eddie Eight—they're all gone, along, he has to assume, with the entire ESUSA mall, the only home he can remember.
And he's hungry. His Doll was another casualty, so he suspects that peanut‐butter‐and‐banana sandwiches are also a thing of the past. Aside from that, as Leary might say, things are jim dandy.
The wind dies. The air clears, and, forgetful of the relentless ravening at his heels, Cisco stands motionless. He stares ahead, due north, and believes that he's seeing things.
•
Vivid and unlikely relief in this hungry ocean of blur dust, the mirage lies a kilometer away. Cisco's HIID scrolls furiously, identifying gray‐white limestone faces stained with rust and rising from jungle, dense vegetation ascending every gorge, every crack and cranny to crown the crags as though fleeing the sea of dust that laps at the oasis. He sees palm trees. And bamboo. Thick ropy vines, ferns, eruptions, florescences crowding in, waxy‐green, silver and shiny, clambering over, climbing, spilling, clinging, smothering. It reminds him of scenes from places he and Leary have run during northern Thai workouts in the Worlds. He could almost believe that this is in fact only another World, Sky playing games with him again.
But the windborne scents, at once new and familiar, bring unbidden and troubling associations. And when he looks down he can still see his locket. He begins walking again just in time.
•
Cisco ducks as something darts and swoops towards him, flying low. It's a bird. A real bird. A tentacle of dust snaps up out of nowhere and disses the animal. One moment it's there, the next all is dust again. Dust to dust. But the glorious mirage remains.
“Lie down,” says his guide.
Again? They stand a couple of hundred meters from a broad boundary that's been swept down to bedrock by forces unknown and picketed by large gray columns of dust, featureless towers standing erect on either side of the plaguebot border for as far as the eye can see. Cisco recognizes this as one side of a cell in the crackled pattern he saw from the air. The nearer towers are sagging. At almost the same time, he sees sudden flashes in the distance. Satray attacks!
The slowjoe has prostrated itself in the dust, lying there almost invisible even though he's sprawled just a few meters away. “Lie down now,” he tells Cisco. “Do it.” Cisco does this, and he follows as the slowjoe crawls and clanks and scrapes along through low dunes down onto the bare rock. It's hot, and the sweat is pouring through Cisco's mantle; thirst, together with all the interesting developments in the vicinity, does a good job of distracting him from his hunger.
“Okay,” the robot tells Cisco. “Ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Let's go.” With that, the thing clambers to its feet and starts a limping version of a fast march towards the opposite side.
The towers start to slump, and the surging dust piles at their bases extrude slowjoes. Masses of slowjoes. Meanwhile, more satray attacks are raising hell a couple of kilometers away but closer this time. Cisco hastens after his mentor. The robot never deviates. It takes all of Cisco's discipline not to flinch, to turn and run, as they charge right into the advancing slowjoe ranks in front of them. Just when Cisco has decided that this is a good time to die anyway, the blur ranks divide and pass around the bot and himsel
f as though they aren't there. Now he's running from an odd chittering too close behind him. It sounds a bit like the mall maintaining its structure but amplified to amazing levels.
Outside
A window in the dust clears to reveal a vivid, green‐glowing gem. Three or four kilometers ahead, a magnificent World has ballooned through a qubital wormhole into mondo existence. And if Cisco is still alive, he's either inside that green enclave or still trying to get there. So Dee Zu must go that way too.
The window closes again. Dee Zu plods on in near‐zero visibility. Her left cheek is warmer than her right. If that's the sun, since it's late afternoon she should still be heading north. It isn't clear how Toot is navigating, but he's wading along with apparent confidence, a miniature quadruped slowjoe all but invisible most of the time. Dee Zu still tends to think of Toot as Joy's pet lapdog, and she's reluctant to surrender the helm entirely. She crouches on all fours, hands buried to the wrists in dust. She feels a crust beneath the surface layer, her fingers tracing ridges, tiny dunes regimented by prevailing winds. She last saw Cisco and the other proceeding what she reckons was due north. The ridges face roughly southwest. So north lies at an angle of forty‐five degrees from the way they're pointing. The same way Toot is headed.
The wind has shifted and is now coming from the north, bringing Dee Zu the faintest whiff of something organic, alive, a tiny detonator that triggers a disproportionate cognitive explosion in her. The scent also provides another fix on the direction.
•
Dee Zu walks up on a low ridge to reconnoiter. Toot follows, never mind he's patently anxious to get on with it. They look towards that distant mirage of spectacular color and detail, a surreal projection on this dismal landscape.
Now she sees other things out there. Dee Zu first spots one of them to the west. Then she scans the horizon to find, in all directions, more ill‐defined cognates of the oasis. They flicker in and out of visibility at irregular intervals in unpredictable places. She and Toot slide down from the high ground, adopting a lower profile before setting out northward, in the direction the real image appears most often. But even that oasis jumps around. Occasionally it disappears; at times this is because of the dust, and sometimes it isn't. Then the satrays strike.
MOM Page 15
