by Tad Williams
Orlando and Fredericks exchanged a look, but there was little to be done. "We are here to defend the temple, yes," Orlando lied. "And help you in the fight against those two—against . . . against. . . ."
"Taffy and Waymott," said Fredericks helpfully.
"Good, good," Upaut grinned, showing every tooth. He apparently cared little for the correct pronunciation of his enemies' names, or else had simply stopped listening to most of what was said to him. "Excellent. When the time is right, we shall burst from the temple like Grandfather Ra appearing on the eastern horizon and our enemies shall wail and throw themselves in the dust at our feet. Oh, they do not suspect our power! They do not know how mighty we are! They will weep and beg our forgiveness, but we are stern, and will punish dreadfully all who raised arms against us. We will reign a million years, and all the stars will chant our praises!
"Supreme one, beautiful in adornment,"
he abruptly sang, booming out the hymn to himself,
"Your armor bright as the barque of Ra Mighty in voice, Wepwawett He Who Opens the Way, The master in the West, To whom all turn their faces— You are mighty in majesty. . . !"
As the priests of Ra somewhat raggedly took up the tune—most of them appearing a little less than wholehearted—Orlando realized that the "we" Upaut claimed would do all those things was Upaut himself, and that the wolf-god was as deranged as a box of worms.
When the hymn had stuttered to a halt, and just before Upaut could start the second verse he seemed eager to commence, Orlando hurriedly asked him, "Do you still have my sword?"
"Sword?" The huge yellow eyes squinted for a moment in thought. "Sword. Hmmm. Yes, I think I may have put it somewhere—have a look behind the throne. Not really the weapon of a king, you see. Oh, armor bright as the barque of Ra" he crooned quietly to himself as his head nodded forward. His eyes closed even farther, until they were only slits.
Orlando and Fredericks sidled around the throne until they were out of his sight, then paused briefly to roll their own eyes in a silently shared opinion of the wolf-god. They quickly discovered Orlando's sword, or more accurately Thargor's sword, in an unpleasant pile of chicken bones and bits of hardened candle wax which had been swept behind the throne. Orlando lifted it up and sighted along the blade. Except for a few notches and dings that had not been there before, it was substantially unharmed, the same sword which Thargor had carried in his earliest adventures as a barbarian immigrant in the decadent south of the Middle Country.
As they started back toward the Circle's encampment in a wide swing meant to keep as much distance between themselves and the throne as possible, the monkeys (who had been uncharacteristically silent during the audience with Upaut) began to dance on.
Orlando's shoulders. Fredericks' own passengers immediately leaped across to join them.
"Mighty in smell, Wolfman!"
they sang, growling an imitation of Upaut's voice between arpeggios of giggles,
"He Who Gets In the Way, To whom all turn their backs— You are mighty in stupidity. . . !"
Orlando and Fredericks tried to shush them, but the monkeys had been forced to keep still too long. Orlando hurried his steps; as he glanced back, he was relieved to see that Upaut seemed completely sunk in his own thoughts, oblivious even to the priests at his feet. The wolf-god's long muzzle tilted slowly up and down as though he were just now scenting something that had already vanished.
An extremely large creature was stretched near the bronze front doors of the temple, the only thing in sight that seemed in scale with the massive portal. Even if the recumbent figure had not been so huge, Orlando could not have helped noticing it, since it occupied the middle of a large clear space—an oddity in itself with the temple so crowded. At first he thought it was Dua, the lavender giant who had met them on their way in, but this sphinx's skin was faintly orange, the color of sunset on stone. Saf, as his brother had named him, was no less impressive than his twin, the statuesque human head topping a leonine body the size of a small bus. The creature's eyes were closed, but as Orlando and Fredericks skirted the edge of the crowd, trying to work their way through the tangle of brown bodies, its nostrils flared; a moment later the dark eyes opened and fixed on them. Although the sphinx watched them without expression, and did not move even a paw in their direction, they still hurried to put several layers of the crowd between themselves and that serene but terrifying gaze.
Orlando had to stop for a moment and catch his breath. He decided he would rather battle six red gryphons than either one of the Temple of Ra's guardians.
Fredericks might have been reading his thoughts. "Those things are a major shiver."
"Pah!" someone else said. "It's all shit—make-believe for idiots."
It took a moment before Orlando recognized the young man who had been introduced to them earlier as Vasily. Other than the slightly rakish way he had combed back his sim's dark hair and his cock-of-the-walk stance, his Egyptian sim looked like many others in the great room.
"What is?"
"This." Vasily made a broad gesture encompassing all of Egypt, or perhaps even the whole of the network. He fell in beside Orlando and Fredericks as they started to walk again. "This old rubbish. Pharaohs, temples, pyramids. Shit and Godlessness."
Looking around at the profusion of animal-headed deities, Orlando thought that godlessness was hardly the problem—if anything, the place had rather an excess of them—but he said nothing: there was something about the young man that made him nervous. Fredericks was looking at the newcomer with interest, though, and Orlando suddenly felt a pang of jealousy. "What would you do with a network like this?" he asked, in part to cover his own confusion.
Vasily scowled, then reached up to capture one of the Wicked Tribe, who had flown near his head on a reconnaissance mission. He examined the little monkey for a moment, then flicked it away in a dismissive manner that made Orlando angry. "Something better than this," the Russian youth said as the spurned monkey swooped back to Fredericks' shoulder, cursing shrilly and indignantly in a language Orlando did not recognize. "Something that would show the true glory of our Lord, not this shit. Egypt is dirt—it's a waste of space." His frown abruptly relaxed as a woman with the head of a bird walked past, talking anxiously to a group of white-robed priests. "Why does a stork stand on one leg?"
Orlando was caught by surprise. "Huh?"
"It's a joke, stupid. Why does a stork stand on one leg?" Vasily wiggled his fingers impatiently. "Give up? Because if he lifted it off the ground, he'd fall down!" He snorted with laughter.
Fredericks laughed, too, which set off another little depth charge of jealousy inside Orlando, but it was alleviated slightly when Fredericks leaned over and whispered in Orlando's ear, "He's so scanny!"
Vasily scooped up a small stone and began tossing it high in the air and catching it, first in one hand, then the other; after a while he began catching it behind his back, which required him to stop in the middle of the temple floor, forcing others to walk around him. Orlando did not stop to wait for him, and after a moment Fredericks followed, but it did not seem to matter much to Vasily, who was totally absorbed in his game. Orlando could not help wondering how old Vasily really was and what kind of crimes he'd been involved in: he'd heard that some of the Russian gangs used kids as young as ten or eleven.
Bonnie Mae Simpkins was waiting for them with the little-girl sim of the woman named Kimi. She asked if they'd seen Vasily.
"Over there." Orlando cocked a thumb. "He's playing with a rock."
Mrs. Simpkins knitted her formidable brow. "I suppose I'll have to get after him, then—the men wanted him to help. They want you boys, too, both of you."
"Help where?"
"At the gateway. Nandi's trying to find out if this idea of his works." She pointed down the wall to the far corner. "You go along there, where that door is. They're waiting for you. But not you, monkeys," she told the Wicked Tribe, who flapped and chattered their protests. "You can just come with me and
stay out of the way." Her fierce look drew even the most reluctant monkeys toward her like a magnet. With the tiny yellow creatures settled on her shoulders, she started away toward Vasily, then paused. "You all be careful, now," she told Orlando seriously.
"I really don't have a good feeling about any of this, Gardiner," Fredericks whispered when the others had vanished into the crowd. "It's going to be dark soon. You know something bad's going to happen then, don't you?"
Orlando could only shrug.
Both the doorway in the corner of the great chamber and the small room behind it were deep in shadow as Orlando and Fredericks stepped through, but not for long. Something flickered and then began to glow beyond another door on the room's far side, drawing the pair on. In the farther room, Nandi Paradivash and the old man called Mr. Pingalap stood bathed in the golden light of a gateway. For a moment Orlando's heart rose, but as he and Fredericks hurried forward Nandi lifted a warning hand.
"Don't come too close! I hope you left the monkeys in some other place. We are waiting to see if anything is going to come through."
They stopped. All four stood silently until the gateway glimmered and then died, leaving only a small oil lamp to illuminate the windowless stone room.
"You let it close. . . !" Orlando protested.
"Quiet, please." Nandi raised his hand, then turned to Pingalap. "How long?"
The old man shook his head. "About thirty seconds, I would guess."
"We're trying to gauge the length of what we call the flare," Nandi explained, "—how long the gate will stay open without people passing through it—not unlike the sensor in an elevator, do you see?" He showed a little smile. "More importantly, though, we are also trying to determine how long before a randomized gateway shifts its connection to a new simulation—other people's experiences suggest it cycles almost directly after each use. We are nearing our answers, but there is still one important experiment left to perform. We can open a gateway here any time we want—the problem is, unless my guess about the larger cycle is correct, we can't know what simulation it's opening up to." He turned back to his companion. "Are you ready, sir?"
Mr. Pingalap nodded, then—to the surprise and embarrassment of both Fredericks and Orlando—stripped off his linen garment, which was as long as a bedsheet and only slightly narrower. He stood naked while Nandi tore the garment in half and knotted the two ends together, then the old man took the improvised rope and tied it around his waist.
Seeing the astonishment of the onlookers, Nandi smiled. "Mr. Pingalap is going to go through, but if he can't come back, what he discovers will do us little good."
"But there must be rope around here somewhere. . . ." said Fredericks, who was trying hard not to stare at the old man's well-simulated and quite wrinkly nakedness.
"But do you see," Pingalap said a little crossly, "rope from this simulation will not exist in the next, whereas the clothes I wear will travel in some form." He smiled as if to make up for his bad temper. His few remaining teeth were an interesting variety of colors, none of which was white.
"I get it," Fredericks said.
"But I thought you said you knew which place the gateway was going to open to," Orlando protested. His dream of getting out and getting on with this exhausting adventure while he still had the strength suddenly seemed foolish.
"I think I do," said Nandi calmly. "But until we check, I won't know what part of the cycle we're in, so I won't know which of my guesses about what's coming next I am testing. Are you quite ready, Mr. Pingalap?"
The old man nodded and shuffled to the center of the room where the lamplight glinted on a solar disk carved across the floor. The trailing length of linen cloth looked bizarrely like a bride's veil. Nandi followed him to the edge of the carving, then turned to the teenagers.
"Will you two take the end and hold it? I had planned that Vasily would help, but it seems he has wandered away."
"Wouldn't it be better if we tied it around us, too?" Orlando asked.
"Better in terms of security, but it would give him no room to move. He may have to take a few steps to be able to see anything useful. Just hold please, and pull him back when he gives two sharp tugs."
"Two sharp tugs!" echoed Mr. Pingalap cheerfully. He saw how Fredericks and Orlando averted their eyes; his breathy chortle as he gestured to his withered flesh was so high-pitched that it could have come from one of the Wicked Tribe. "The body itself is illusion—and this is not even a real body!"
Orlando did not explain that their reaction was as much aesthetic as modest. Nandi Paradivash made a few broad signals with his hand and a shimmering golden rectangle opened atop the solar disk. Mr. Pingalap stepped through, and Nandi quietly began to count.
"Hold tight," he cautioned between numbers. "We do not know what he will find."
Orlando adjusted his grip, but the length of cloth hung limp.
"Where is it you two wish to go, by the way?" Nandi asked. "If we are unlucky, Pingalap is at your destination right this moment and we will have to wait for the gateway to cycle through again. But out of all the possible simulations, it does not seem likely yours would be the first we try."
Orlando had a moment of sudden blankness. Fredericks nudged him and whispered, "Walls."
"Right. Priam's Walls—that's what the lady in the Freezer told us."
Nandi frowned, more in distraction than at Orlando's words, but a moment later he turned and said, "Priam's Walls? Troy?"
Orlando shrugged, uncertain.
"That is a strange coincidence," said Nandi. "No, I doubt it is coincidence. . . ."
He was interrupted by Mr. Pingalap's sudden appearance in the gateway. Looking no worse for wear—but no better either, Orlando thought—the old man shuffled out of the rectangle of fiery light. As he began to speak, the gate flickered behind him, then vanished.
"It was like the Potala," he reported, "—a huge palace in the highest mountains. But it was not the Potala. It looked too . . . too. . . ."
"Too Western?" Nandi asked. "That is likely Shangri-La, then." He looked down at the handful of tiles on which he had scribbled his notes. "Let us try again and see what we find."
Another gateway was summoned. As it smoldered into being, Orlando heard a loud wash of sound from the temple's great chamber, voices raised in alarm, people running. Mr. Pingalap vanished into the golden glow and the length of cloth abruptly snapped tight. Orlando was jerked forward; behind him, he could feel Fredericks stumble as he fought for balance.
"Hang on!" Orlando called as he was dragged nearer to the gateway. "Pull!"
"Don't pull him out," Nandi warned. "He will let us know—he is counting also, and he must have time to make observations."
"Observations?" Orlando shouted. "Something's trying to swallow him!"
Nandi reached out to help steady them. A moment later, Orlando was surrounded by a distracting cloud of yellow—the Wicked Tribe, swarming like bees. By the time Nandi had reached twenty in his slow count, Orlando felt what he thought was something jerking on the cloth rope through the steady pull. He threw all his Thargor-weight against it and yanked hard, half-expecting to drag some terrible monster through the gateway who had gulped the old man like a fishhook, but instead the venerable Pingalap popped out of the golden rectangle as suddenly as a cork from a bottle. The countervailing pressure gone, Orlando and Fredericks tumbled backward, Orlando landing on top of his friend.
The Wicked Tribe whirled delightedly above them like stars over a cartoon head injury. "Again!" they squealed. "Pull, pull, fall down! Again!"
"It was some sort of wind tunnel." Mr. Pingalap gasped. He was crouching as though he had just finished a marathon, his wispy hair sticking straight up and an expression of bliss on his face. "A canyon, in truth, but the wind caught me and dragged me right off the edge. I am glad you had me anchored!"
Nandi frowned at his calculations. "It should have been Prester John's African kingdom—could it have been that?"
The old man slapped h
is bony knees and straightened up. "I don't know. I saw nothing except rocks and trees.—I was busy flying like a kite at the end of a string."
"We'll have to do it again," Nandi said.
The Tribe had finally begun to settle. "What that shiny thing was?" Zunni asked, perching on Orlando's nose so that she was only a banana-colored blur. "Why door there, then no door?"
Orlando realized that the Tribe had never seen one of the gateways, and as he levered himself back upright, wondered again how the children had gone straight to this Egyptian simulation and been imprisoned, while he and Fredericks and everyone else connected through the Blue Dog Anchorite man had wound up in Bolivar Atasco's Temilún.
How . . . or why. . . ?
The thought was interrupted. Bonnie Mae Simpkins entered the chamber, Kimi and sullen Vastly in tow. "There's something happening at the front door," Bonnie Mae told Nandi worriedly. "The soldiers outside are all shifting around, and that big sphinx thing—what's his name, Saf?—is standing up now. He's not saying anything, but he's standing there like he's waiting. I don't like it." She saw the monkeys draped across Orlando and her eyes narrowed. "There you little monsters are. I'm going to put you rascals in a sack."
"Run away, run away!" the monkeys squealed, rising in a yellow cyclone and rushing past her, through the antechamber and back out into the temple's great hall.
"This is not funny!" Bonnie Mae shouted after them. "You all come back here!" For the first time since Orlando had met her she sounded genuinely frightened, but the monkeys had managed to get out of earshot quickly enough to escape the compelling force of her voice. "They're just kids—they don't understand this is dangerous," she said helplessly. "Vasily, Kimi, come help me catch them."
The two women hurried out, but Vasily stopped at the far door, gazing into the main chamber. "The fighting will start soon," he called back. The dreamy way he said it made it sound like he couldn't wait.
"All the more reason to help them find those children," Nandi shouted to him. "We have no time for distraction here." He turned and patted Mr. Pingalap on the shoulder. "Forward, please." As Orlando and Fredericks took up positions once more, wrapping the cloth around their fists for a better grip, the slender man summoned up another gateway. "Step through!"
