The Free Lunch

by Spider Robinson

  Firefall, reprised—

  WHEN HE SAT up, the train was out of sight. He was not sure whether he had lost consciousness or not, or if so, for how long. With no way of knowing how soon the next train would be through, he had to assume it would be any moment.

  Get up, at least to a crouch, and put on a silly leer, empty your eyes, it’s okay to look at them, they expect that, but empty your eyes first, you are an audio-animatronic robot, here comes the train now, empty your eyes, here it is, shit, there’s somebody in the front seat looking this way, look down, oh shit, move, cover up that shin, if she sees the blood she might report you’re leaking oil, cover it with your hand while you turn that side away from her, smile, here she comes there they go MOVE! seven, six, five, four, careful don’t knock over that robot, two, Safe!

  —I think.

  He crouched down in his place of concealment behind a pseudoboulder, and balanced risks. If the girl in the car had seen his bleeding shin—dammit, it hurt, now that he had time for it—she might report it, in which case he was probably screwed. How likely was it that the girl was a busybody?

  Well, girls often were, in his experience. But she might simply assume that the blood was fake, part of the show. A wounded Elf for the Unicorn to heal.

  The audio-animatronic robot he had dodged on his way to cover—a wizened old Elf—was coming toward him, making faintly audible whirring sounds. That was odd—he was sure that none of the robots had an itinerary that brought them through this space; he had been on this ride dozens of times, studying, rehearsing. Hell—perhaps this one was malfunctioning, in some way that was registering on a dial somewhere in Central Control! Time to move on. But the robot Elf stood between him and the rest of the diorama, coming closer. He backed out of its way, deeper into cover.

  It stopped where he had been crouching, and crouched itself. Its faint little servo-sounds ceased. Its monkeylike face swiveled to track him.

  It winked.

  And said, “If you leave that bloodstain out there on the set, they’ll know, and they won’t rest until they find you.”

  SHOCK MIGHT HAVE paralyzed his limbs and tongue, but instead the reverse happened. From his hunkered crouch he exploded into something very like a Russian saber dancer’s four-limbed hah! kick, and a shout grew in his stomach and raced like vomit up his throat—

  —where he nearly choked on it, because the robot, moving faster than any robot he knew, seemed to have a hand over his mouth, and another behind his head to brace against. He tried to yank free, and what stopped him was not the futility of pitting his strength against that of a robot, but the sudden realization of how difficult it was not. The robot hands were strong, stronger than his own—but far less strong than they should have been. They were warm.

  Too many urgent inputs will cause most information systems to crash, and he had been in crummy shape to start with. He went limp.

  The Elf caught him under the arms, gently laid him down in a spot where he would be concealed from view, and stood back up.

  Another train came through. He lay there dizzily and watched the Elf mime a plausible routine for it. The soft sounds of servomechanisms and hydraulics, the sharp sounds of clattering wheels and laughing children, and the sequentially fading series of Xerox copies that echo made of all these, all washed over him. They very nearly overwhelmed the sound of his heart banging in his chest.

  “I’ve had my eye on you for the last week or so,” the Elf murmured when the train was past, without looking at him. “I figured you were going to make your move soon. I like the way you handle yourself. You have respect, and you’re not stupid.”

  “You’re human,” he said softly, wonderingly.

  The Elf grimaced. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re a—a—” He scrambled back up to a crouch. “—a girl.”

  “Make up your mind,” she said. “Am I human or not?” She sounded like an aunt or a teacher. As old as her Elf persona looked, and sour. But she was no taller than he was. “Oh, the hell with it. Wait here.”

  She straightened up, making soft mechanical humming sounds again—he realized with wonder and some amusement that she was actually humming them—and walked around the boulder, out onto the set of the Unicorn’s Glade and into view of its patrons. He had practiced imitating robot movements a great deal, but this…person…was much better. He scrambled to the edge of cover to watch her.

  She walked in a seemingly random pattern that led her past the spot where he had first fallen and hurt his shin. When she reached it, she improvised a move which was in character for her Elf persona, and which brought her down on one knee. She remained on that knee until a train had passed, slid the knee back and forth along the floor, then rose and returned to his place of concealment. The blood that had been on the floor was now almost invisible on her dark trouser leg.

  “Come on,” she said, and continued past him.

  Doing his own robot walk, he followed her…

  C H A P T E R 2

  UNDER

  …and she walked straight into a boulder and vanished.

  He followed without hesitation—not because he grasped that the boulder was a hologram, but simply because he was in shock. When he passed through it himself, things changed too fast for him to integrate. Nearly at once he encountered another wall, and his knees and face proved this one was not a hologram. He rebounded, his vision dithering, and would have gone down again if she had not caught him. Both her grip and her arms were too strong for someone her size. She smells like a robot, he thought. Like machine oil.

  “Always turn right,” she murmured in his ear.

  “Huh?”

  She stood him on his feet, released him, and stepped back. “In Dreamworld, if you walk through something you thought was there, always turn right. It’s a rule of thumb.” She pointed.

  Sure enough, the concealed corridor they were in now debouched to their right. He filed the information and studied her.

  She was exactly his own height, which was not impressive even for a twelve-year-old, but she was unquestionably an adult. Face and voice confirmed it, as did body language now that she was no longer imitating a robot. She was a midget. Not a Dwarf, but a perfectly proportioned small person. With powerful arms and hands. Her wrinkled features, the smoky rasp in her voice, and the great dignity with which she carried herself made him think of a maiden aunt or a school principal, but somehow she would not have fit into either pigeonhole even if she were not dressed as a robot Elf. She was old enough and certainly sour enough…but she wasn’t sad enough.

  She’s not lonely, he thought, and wondered how he could know such a thing about her.

  “My fault,” she went on. “I should have caught you as you came through. I assumed if you got this far, you knew that much.”

  “This is only the third time I’ve been all the way backstage,” he said. “And I got caught right away the other times. Like under a minute.”

  “You’re getting better,” she said. “This was a good place. You’d have made it if you hadn’t fallen. This far, at least.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He inspected his shin. “Thanks,” he added belatedly, realizing he had been complimented. “Uh…who are you?”

  “Annie.”

  “Oh. Uh…hi, Annie.”

  “Don’t say uh—it’s unbecoming. I have an excuse to grunt; you don’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “And ‘huh’ is even worse.”

  He was not prepared to debate diction. He reached, and came up with perhaps the only thing left in the world that he was reasonably certain of. “I’m Mike.”

  “Hello, Mike. Welcome to Dreamworld Under.”

  “Uh—” He caught himself. “Sorry. Thanks, Annie. Am I really here? I mean, are we safe now?”

  She shrugged. “Probably safer than most of the people on this weary planet, boy. Relax. They can’t see in here, they can’t hear in here, they can’t smell in here unless I want them to—and they don’t even know that. A
nd the next inspection team isn’t due through this area for weeks, unless something glitches.”

  The knot of muscle at the base of his neck relaxed just barely enough for him to notice. “Good. Thanks, Annie. I hope I didn’t, uh…I mean—”

  “Don’t mention it. Especially not to anybody else. So what’s—” She stopped, frowned at something, and rephrased. “How long were you thinking of staying in Dreamworld?”

  “Well…,” he began, so he wouldn’t say “Uh,” and used the tiny interval to think hard about the question. It was one he had been postponing himself, for some time now, and he knew she had not asked it casually. “As long as I can,” he said finally.

  Something in her serene face changed. For an instant he thought he might have offended her, or perhaps saddened her somehow, but then she said, “Good answer.” She closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Okay,” she said, opening them again. “You seem lucky. And clever. And reasonably polite. Here is how it will be. I will help you—but neither of us is ever going to ask the other why they came here. Ever. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Okay,” he said simply.

  “Here’s your end of the bargain,” she said. “You have to listen to me.”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t look so dismayed. I don’t mean you have to hang a patient look on your face while I blather about my youth, for God’s sake. I mean you have to pay attention when I tell you things. Talking is very hard work for me; I hardly ever do it. And if I have to tell you things twice, you’re going to make some stupid blunder and get at least one of us busted out of here. I warn you: if it’s me, this place is going to turn on you.”

  He digested that. “How long have you been here, Annie?”

  “Under, you mean? What year is it?”

  “Twenty-three,” he said, beginning to be awed. “July something, 2023.”

  “Thirteen years, then.” She turned on her heel and walked away.

  Mike knew he must follow her, and still he stood frozen a moment in shock. Dreamworld was only a little over thirteen years old.

  He snapped out of it and raced after her.

  IT WAS A little like learning that one unicorn exists. It changed everything.

  Mike felt like a biochemist who has labored for years to synthesize a wonderful new drug, then learns aborigine herb-doctors have known about that one for centuries. As they moved behind the scenes of Dreamworld, he tried to pay attention to his surroundings, but had trouble keeping his mind on the task. His eyes kept being drawn to his guide. His hero, now that he knew she existed. Mike’s hopeless, desperate, quixotic quest was actually possible. Someone had done it. This unprepossessing midget auntie before him had done it. Had been doing it for longer than he had been alive.

  No wonder she wasn’t lonely! She had the Unicorn, the Warlock, Westley and Buttercup, the Mother Thing, the Hippogriff, Wanda the Werepoodle, Captain Horatio and his crew, Master Li and Number Ten Ox, Mike Callahan and his friends, Moondog Johnny, Lummox and John Thomas, and all the countless Elves and Trolls and Leprechauns and Dwarves for her constant companions. No wonder she looked so serene! For longer than his own lifetime, she had been living not just in a, but in the, Dreamworld. No wonder she accepted him. They were kindred spirits, in a world of clones. He studied her with intense fascination. So that was how she walked when she wasn’t imitating a robot…

  It suddenly came to him that he had absolutely no idea how they had gotten from where they started to where they were now—which was halfway down a long tubular shaft with a ladder on one side. There were the rumbling sounds of a ride somewhere nearby, but he could neither locate its direction nor identify it, save that it seemed to be moving too fast to be any part of the Unicorn’s Glade. He glanced up, and the shaft appeared simply to end about fifty meters higher up: no access hatch was visible. He glanced down and saw only that he was lagging behind.

  When he reached the bottom of the ladder, Annie stood aside and made room for him to step down onto the metal floor. She gestured at a keypad on the wall. “Do what I did up there,” she said.

  “I didn’t see it,” he confessed, reddening in shame.

  She clouded up. “I told you not to make me repeat myself. What the hell were you looking at?”

  “You,” he said miserably.

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, my stars and garters. ‘God has punished my contempt for authority…’” She sighed and reopened her eyes. “At least have the wit to pay particular attention to my hands, then. I do most of my best work with them.”

  “Yes, Annie.”

  With insultingly exaggerated pantomime, she addressed the keypad and punched in a four-digit number. A door silently dilated next to the keypad. “Got it this time?”

  “How do you know what number to use?” he asked.

  “From this.” She held up her left wrist to display a Command Band like those worn by Dreamworld’s employees. It resembled a Guest’s Dreamband, with pop-up monitor and keypad added. She hadn’t been wearing it during her stint as an Elf; she must have slipped it on while he wasn’t looking. “It also makes me invisible to three different surveillance systems—and you, too, as long as you stay within three meters of me.”

  She hit clear on the keypad, and the door winked shut again. “Seven one three nine six fourteen three point one four one five seventeen eleventy-five,” she chanted in a rapid monotone, and stood aside. “Now you try it.”

  He went to the keypad, punched four digits, and the door reappeared.

  “Better,” she said curtly, and shouldered him aside to step through.

  At that moment he realized suddenly that he was ravenously hungry. He decided not to mention it and followed her. He’d been hungry before. He’d never been Under in Dreamworld before.

  They passed through a series of environments in rapid succession. Each time she let him key in the code that admitted them to the next. Some he could identify at least tentatively as air-circulation tunnels, engine rooms, repair shops, switching nodes, degaussing zones, and the like. Some were so unfamiliar he could not even guess their nature or function. Some were noisy, some as silent as a stone. All were well lit and clean. As he doggedly memorized the route, he mentally labeled such regions things like place where it smells funny or room with no room or inside the dentist’s drill. He had the general impression that Annie and he were gradually descending below ground. At one point they heard approaching voices and footsteps, and she led him immediately and unerringly to the nearest good hiding place, where they waited together until the danger was past.

  A little while later she stopped short again. Mike looked around for another hidey-hole—but instead of hiding, she went to a nearby machine, a big complex thing he could not identify. She stared at it, sniffed it, reached into it and made some adjustment, then bent and put her ear up against the side of it and listened. After several seconds had elapsed, she frowned and straightened. Taking a red marker from a pocket, she wrote something on the wall above the machine. A single rune, which Mike didn’t recognize. It looked a little like the classical symbol for “male,” but was subtly different. Without explanation she put away the marker and they continued on their way.

  At the end of a long featureless lime-green corridor, they came to another keypad, and he automatically began to enter the access code. She stopped him with an upraised hand. “This time,” she said, “punch in the date of Opening Day.”

  He blinked. “The whole thing?”

  “If you know it,” she agreed.

  He punched in the six digits of the date on which Thomas Immega had opened the gates of his mighty dream for the first time, thirteen years earlier. At once he heard the familiar, barely audible sound of a door dilating, but no doorway appeared where he was expecting it. He decided the sound might have come from off to one side, though he wasn’t sure which, and glanced quickly in both directions. Still no door. But he had not heard it sigh shut again yet. Or had he only imagined hearing it in the first place?

&n
bsp; He looked at Annie. She was trying not to smile. It made him mad. He closed his eyes, thought furiously…then turned on his heel and walked directly into the left wall of the corridor.

  As he passed through it, he was already turning right. He was in a small room; before him was a door—a real old-fashioned door, with hinges and a knob—and in front of it lay a welcome mat. He stopped and waited for Annie to catch up.

  She came through the hologram wall still trying not to smile, but having trouble with it. “Not bad. How did you know which direction to go in, back in the corridor?”

  “You said always turn right when you go through a holo. If it was in the other wall, you’d have to turn left whenever you left home.”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?”

  Her rebel smile disappeared. She blinked. “Point taken. I beg your pardon, and withdraw the question.” She sighed, pointed her wristband at the door, and the door beeped softly. “Well, are we going to stand out here all night, or do you want supper?”

  He allowed himself to become aware of the black hole at his center, and nearly fainted with sudden hunger. He turned and opened the door—

  —stopped and wiped his feet on the mat—

  —stepped through and turned to see her staring at him oddly.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “This might just work,” she said. “Isn’t that hilarious?”

  He suddenly started to see the whole situation from her point of view. He began to giggle.

  To his astonishment, she joined him. She had not, until now, seemed to be the sort of person who giggled. It struck him funny. Before he knew it, all his anger and most of his tension were boiling out of him as laughter. It felt oddly like throwing up. Then his vision started doing special effects: first solarization, then color-shimmer, and finally dissolve to random vibrant pixels.