Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond

by Unknown

  Dorothy was just a little disappointed. When she’d imagined returning to Oz in the past, she’d always thought there would be a great crowd of Munchkins waiting for her, with flags and banners and songs, happy to welcome her back. Those marvelous child-sized people in their tall hats with little bells around the brim. But there was no one there to greet her. No one at all.

  Dorothy was surprised to find herself a young woman, in a smart blue-and-white dress, with silver shoes, rather than the small child she’d been the last time she visited Oz. Though this was how she’d thought of herself, for many years, long after she stopped seeing that image in the mirror. She patted herself down and was surprised at how solid and real she felt. And not a pain or an ache anywhere.

  She jumped up and down and spun around in circles, waving her arms about and laughing out loud, glorying in the simple joy of easy movement. And then she stopped abruptly as a dog came running up to her, wagging his tail furiously. A little black dog with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled so very merrily. He danced around her, jumping up at her, almost exploding with joy. Dorothy knelt down to smile at him.

  “You look just like the dog I used to have when I was just a little girl,” she said. “His name was Toto.”

  The dog sat back on his haunches and grinned at her. “That’s because I am Toto,” said the dog in a rough breathy voice. “Hello, Dorothy! I’ve been waiting here for such a long time for you to come and join me.”

  Dorothy stared at him blankly. “You can talk?”

  “Of course!” said Toto, scratching himself briskly. “This is Oz, after all.”

  “But…you’re dead, Toto,” Dorothy said slowly. “You died…a long time ago.”

  “What does that matter where Oz is concerned?” asked the little dog. “Aren’t you glad to see me again?”

  Dorothy gathered the little dog up in her arms and hugged him tightly, as though to make sure no one could ever take him away from her again. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and Toto lapped them up gently with his little pink tongue.

  Finally she had to let him go, if only so she could look at him again. Toto backed away to regard her seriously with his head cocked to one side.

  “You have to come with me now, Dorothy.”

  “Where?”

  “Along the road of yellow brick, of course,” said Toto. “To where all your old friends are waiting to meet you again.”

  Dorothy straightened up and looked, and sure enough, there it was: a long straight road stretching off into the distance, paved with yellow bricks. A soft butter-yellow—easy and inviting to the eye. Nothing like the gaudy shade in the movie. Dorothy smiled and set off briskly down the road, with Toto scampering along happily beside her. She had no doubt the road would lead her to answers, just as it always had.

  The sun shone brightly, with not a cloud anywhere in that most perfect of skies. Birds sang sweetly, a cool breeze caressed her face, and Dorothy’s heart was so full of simple happiness it felt like it might break apart at any moment. It felt good to just be striding along, stretching her legs after so much time in that damned wheelchair. Neat fences painted a delicate duck’s-egg blue ran along either side of the road, just as she remembered. Beyond them lay huge open fields full of every kind of crop, so that the whole land was one great checkerboard of primary colors.

  Soon enough she came to a small summerhouse of gleaming white wood, standing stiff and upright all on its own at the side of the road. Bright-green jade and rich blue lapis lazuli made delicate patterns over the gleaming white. And there, inside the summerhouse, sitting at a table, were two women she recognized immediately: Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch. They were taking tea together and chatting quite companionably. They stopped their conversation and put down their teacups to smile brightly at Dorothy.

  She stopped a cautious distance away and studied them both carefully. Toto sat down at her feet, apparently entirely undisturbed. The Witches looked pleasant enough—two cheerful young women who didn’t seem any older than Dorothy was. Or was now. Glinda wore white, and the Wicked Witch wore green, but otherwise there wasn’t much to choose between them. They might have been sisters. Dorothy remembered them as being much older the first time she encountered them, but she had been just a small child at the time. All adults seemed old then.

  Dorothy crossed her arms tightly and gave both Witches her best hard look. “It seems to me,” she said firmly, “that an explanation is in order.”

  Glinda and the Wicked Witch shared an understanding smile, and then beamed sweetly at Dorothy.

  “You were just a child when you came here, my dear,” said Glinda. “And you wanted an adventure. So we provided one. In a form you could understand. You can have anything you want here.”

  “Glinda played the Good Witch, so I played the Bad,” said the Witch in green. “Though you were never in any danger, of course.”

  “So nothing that happened here was real?” asked Dorothy.

  “Well,” said Toto carelessly, “there’s real, and then there’s real. I always found reality very limiting. I couldn’t talk when I was real.”

  “When you were alive…” said Dorothy slowly.

  “Yes,” said Toto. He waited a minute, as though for her to grasp something obvious. Then he sighed and got to his feet again. “Look! Here come some more of your old friends!”

  Dorothy looked around, and her heart jumped in her chest as she saw the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion hurrying down the road of yellow brick to join her, waving and laughing. They all looked just as she remembered them. The Scarecrow was out in front, lurching along, all bulgy and misshapen in his blue suit and pointed blue hat, his head just a sack stuffed with straw with the features painted on. She jumped up and down on the spot, clapping her hands together, until she couldn’t wait any longer and ran forward to grab the Scarecrow and hug him fiercely, burying her face in his yielding shoulder. He scrunched comfortably in her arms.

  The Tin Man was waiting for her when she finally let go of the Scarecrow. He was all shining metal, with his head and arms and legs jointed on, and not an ounce of give in him anywhere, but she still hugged him as best she could. He patted her back carefully with his heavy hands. And finally there was the Lion. He towered over her, standing tall on his two legs, a great shaggy beast. When Dorothy went to hug him, she couldn’t get her arms halfway around him. His breath smelled sweetly of grass.

  But when she finally stepped back from her friends, Dorothy was shocked again when they strolled over to the summerhouse and greeted both Witches as warmly as old friends. Dorothy’s heart suddenly ran cold. She folded her arms again, and hit them all with her hard stare.

  “So,” she said harshly. “If you two just pretended to be Good and Bad Witches, does that mean you three just pretended to be my friends?”

  “Of course we were your friends,” said the Scarecrow in his soft husky voice. “That’s what we were there for. To keep you company, so you wouldn’t be alone and scared. So you could enjoy your adventure.”

  “Right,” said the Tin Man. “A doll to hug, a metal man to protect you, and a cowardly lion to feel superior to.”

  “Wait just a minute,” said the Lion. “There was a lot more to my role than that.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Dorothy, suddenly close to tears.

  “Then let me explain,” said a familiar voice.

  And when Dorothy looked around, there he was, of course. Oz the Great and Terrible. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A little old man with a bald head and a wrinkled face, dressed in the kind of clothes no one had worn since…Dorothy was a child. He smiled kindly at her. There was such obvious warmth and compassion in the smile that she couldn’t help but smile back. She felt better, in spite of herself.

  “I thought you went back to Omaha,” said Dorothy, “in your balloon.”

  “Just another part of your adventure,” said the Wizard. “I never really left. I’m always here, in one form or another.” />
  “Then…you were just playing a role, like all the others?”

  “I am Oz the Great and Terrible, the Kind and Beneficent, and everything else you need me to be. I am the man with all the answers. Come walk with me, Dorothy, and all shall be made clear.”

  Reluctantly Dorothy allowed the little old man to lead her to the road of yellow brick, and they walked along together, the Wizard moving easily beside her. It bothered her on some level that all her old friends stayed behind. That even Toto didn’t come with her. As though the Wizard had things to tell her that could only be said in private. Or perhaps because they already knew, as though they shared some great and terrible secret that only the Wizard himself could tell her.

  “I always was the one with all the answers,” said the Wizard. “Even if I wasn’t necessarily what I seemed.”

  “When I first met you, I saw a huge disembodied Head,” said Dorothy. “The Scarecrow said he saw a lovely Lady. The Tin Man, he saw an awful Beast with the head of a rhinoceros and five arms and legs growing out of a hairy hide. And the Lion saw a Ball of Fire. But in the end, you turned out to be just an old humbug, a man hiding behind a curtain. Why did you insist we had to kill the Wicked Witch before we could all have what we needed?”

  “Because gifts must be earned, and good must triumph over evil if an adventure is to have an end,” said the Wizard. “Did you never wonder why the Wicked Witch, so afraid of water, would keep a bucket of water nearby?”

  “It was a dream,” said Dorothy. “You don’t question what happens in a dream.”

  “Do you remember being old, Dorothy?” the Wizard asked gently.

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “Though that seems like the dream now.”

  “You have finally woken up from that nightmare and come home. Where you belong. This is a good place, Dorothy, where good things happen every day, and the day never ends. Unless you want it to, of course. Look…see?”

  Dorothy looked where he was pointing, out across the great green plain before them. Off in the distance, two young girls were dancing with a huge and noble Lion. A young girl in sensible Victorian clothes was conversing solemnly with a great White Rabbit. And a boy and his Bear played happily together at the edge of a great Forest.

  “I know them,” said Dorothy. “Don’t I…?”

  “Of course,” said the little old man. “Everyone knows them and their stories. Just as everyone knows you and your story. All these children dreamed a great dream of a wonderful place where magical things happened. And some author wrote the stories down to share their dreams with others. All of you, in your own ways, caught just a glimpse of this place, this good place yet to come. For a moment, you left your world and came to mine. And because all of you are my children, you all get to come home again in the end.”

  Dorothy looked steadily at the Wizard. “Who are you, really?”

  He smiled at her with eyes full of all the love there is. “Don’t you know? Really?”

  “And this is…”

  “Yes. This is heaven, and you’ll never have to leave it again.”

  “I’m dead, aren’t I? Like Toto.”

  “Of course. Or to put it another way, you have woken up from the dream of living, into a better dream. Everyone you ever loved, everyone you ever lost, is here waiting for you. Look. There are Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.”

  Dorothy looked down the road to where four young people were waiting. She recognized Em and Henry immediately, though they didn’t seem much older than she was.

  “Who’s that with them?” she asked.

  “Your mother and your father,” said the old man. “They’ve been waiting for you for so long, Dorothy. Go and be with them. And then we’ll all go on to the Emerald City. Because your adventures are only just beginning.”

  But Dorothy was already off and running, down the road of yellow brick, in that perfect land, in that most perfect of dreams.

  DEAD BLUE

  BY DAVID FARLAND

  Tin Man’s life flashed in memory the way that it always did when rebooting—at least, the part of his life stored within his crystal drive.

  He had been traveling with Dorothy, climbing over a razor-backed ridge of gray karst rock, when the Chimeras struck—dropping from the low-hanging fog.

  The first inkling of attack came when a huge weight slammed into his back, knocking him over a precipice onto sharp boulders, and suddenly a Baboon was biting at his throat with dirty yellow fangs, hissing “Die, you motherfu—”

  Its hands smelled of dung and filth; its breath stank of morning kimchee.

  It wrenched Tin Man’s head, as if trying to snap his neck with superhuman strength.

  Tin Man was so shocked, he barely had time to shout a warning, “Dorothy!”

  He activated the vibroblade on his axe and felt it hum to life in his hand.

  Something batted the axe to the ground—a fluttering wing, enormous and batlike. Only then did he realize that his attacker was a Chimera, a life form cobbled together by a mechmage.

  Dozens of others dropped out of the cloud forest, wings fluttering in a blur. They hurled Scarecrow to the ground, scattered his straw, and snatched up Toto and Dorothy.

  Tin Man could not see the Lion and hoped that the coward had made his escape. As the Winged Baboon hit his kill switch, Tin Man marveled at his attackers.

  They were perfectly fitted to their humid terrain, where mountain escarpments split the jungle. Such creatures, with DNA from humans, baboons, and giant bats—flying foxes perhaps?—would easily haul ore from the Witch’s bauxite and platinum mines.

  Tin Man wondered, Do they even know how beautiful they are?

  Dorothy’s eyes were flat blue, the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Her young face was pale from shock, emotionless, framed by strawberry hair the color of bloodied water.

  “Oh, Tin Man, are you all right?” she begged, leaning over him, trying to help him up. He pushed away her hands and tried to rise on his own power.

  As he rebooted, memories burst upon him in waves—flashes of his past life as a machine—while sound files all roared at once, louder than the crashing of the sea.

  All that came to him now were the mech-memories. Nothing from before, nothing from the days when there had still been a fleshy component to him.

  Once, he had been a man. Then he lost a leg and had it replaced with cyberware. As he had aged, more parts came—an artificial lung here, a kidney there, drives and programs to enhance his failing memory—until only a shriveling brain had been left to the cyborg, powered by a dying heart.

  He was not sure when he had quit defining himself as a man and accepted that he was a cyborg.

  Now, he told himself, I am not even a cyborg. I am a construct, a golem made from black plasteel and titanium, hardly better than Scarecrow.

  The recognition brought no sense of loss. He recalled that Dorothy had asked a question. His programming required that he offer a reply. “I feel fine, Dorothy.”

  But can one truly be said to feel fine when he feels nothing at all?

  He was dead inside. His quest to get a new heart—a simple pump to keep his brain alive, his last connection to the world of emotion—had failed. His olfactory sensors could detect the remains of his own rotting organs.

  Tin Man scanned the nearby rocks. The Winged Baboons surrounded them there on the ragged peaks. Dark creatures with gleaming fangs. In infrared, he could see them glowing, as if flames licked their skin. They spread their wings as they sat huffing from a recent flight.

  Dorothy and the Lion exhibited no fear of them. Indeed, Toto sat in the arms of one of their leaders as the creature scratched the dog’s head.

  Several Winged Baboons now leaned over Scarecrow, stuffing the straw back into his clothing, retracing the runes upon his mouth that would let him speak. There is a technology that surpasses mere gears and circuits—a technology so advanced that common men cannot comprehend it.

  Tin Man was not versed in technomagic, but wh
en a Winged Baboon brought out a soulgiver—a forked rod fitted with switches and meters that jolted Scarecrow to life—Tin Man knew enough to feel awe.

  It seemed that much time had passed since he’d died. Vines had grown over his titanium exoskeleton, with its sleek design and black plasteel joints. Weak electronic stimulation to some circuits in his right arm and leg suggested internal corrosion.

  He’d lain here for months.

  “What happened?” he asked Dorothy.

  “The Wicked Witch caught me,” she said. “I killed her.”

  Killing a technomage wasn’t easy. The Witch of the West was an ageless cyborg. Her green skin powered her system by converting sunlight to energy using chlorophyll.

  “How?”

  “She forced me to wash the floors in her castle,” Dorothy said. “She liked to come in and walk on them while they were still wet, leaving muddy tracks. So I waited until she walked in with wet feet, and then I threw down the bare ends of a power strip—and fried her green ass.” Dorothy laughed painfully, halfway to a cry. “Now I’m the Wicked Witch of the West!”

  The Witch’s own pettiness had been her end. Tin Man felt the killing was well justified.

  Dorothy held out her hand as proof of the deed. She wore the Witch’s bracelet, complete with glowing diadems. It looked something like a chronograph, but meters and LEDs tracked the progress of the nanobots that would turn her into a technomage, guided by the bracelet’s own AI. Indeed Dorothy’s arms had begun turning green, as if they were pieces of rotting fruit.