NETFEED/NEWS: Multibillionaire Offers to Buy Mars Project

(visual: Krellor in Monte Carlo news conference)

VO: After declaring bankruptcy only months earlier, former nanotechnology baron Uberto Krellor has come forward with a startling offer to buy the crippled Mars Base Construction Project, lock, stock, and minirobot barrel, providing the UN will give him long-term rights to Mars, including concessions on mining and real estate rights on terraformed environments. Krellor is rumored to be the front man for a shadow-group of financiers kept out of the MBC Project sweepstakes by earlier UN decisions to avoid complete privatization of Martian ventures.

KRELLOR: "Nobody wants to see governments throwing the people's money away over these things anymore. Let a businessman see what he can do, someone who is used to taking risks. If I succeed, all humankind will share the triumph. . . ."

 

Sam Fredericks had seen quite a few things since she had entered the network. After the bloody climax of the Trojan War, a battle between Egyptian gods and sphinxes, and an attack by giant carnivorous salad tongs, she should have been bored with miracles, but she was still a little impressed with the way they started out crossing one river and finished up crossing an entirely different one.

The river itself still seemed largely the same, the water inky beneath the dark sky, feathered with white where it splashed around stones. In happier conditions its breathy murmuring might have been charming, the stone bridge beneath their feet picturesque. Then, as the mists cleared mid-span, Sam saw that the meadowed bank visible from the foot of the bridge had now become the edge of a fogbound forest instead, with steep black mountains looming beyond the trees. She had to admit it was a very effective trick.

But she was sick to death of tricks.

"How?" she whispered to !Xabbu. Azador walked ahead of them, more sleepwalker than traveler. "How did he find this bridge? And how did you know he could do it? We went past this spot before! There utterly wasn't any bridge here."

"Because I suspect we were not here." Her friend was avidly surveying the breakfront of ancient trees—hoping, perhaps, to see another one of Renie's markers fluttering from a branch. "Not the here that has a bridge, I mean." He saw the look on her face and smiled. "It does not make much sense to me either, Sam, but I believe Azador is from this . . . Other's land to begin with, this place built by the operating system, and so things will happen for him that will not happen for us. That is my guess."

"So far, it's a pretty good guess," Sam had to admit.

Azador had already descended from the bridge and was making his way up the dark soil of the bank, apparently headed for the trees.

"We should stop," !Xabbu called after him. "It is getting dark!" Azador did not slow or even turn. "We will have to hurry to keep up with him," !Xabbu told Sam. "If we lose him in the trees we may never find him again."

The bridge sloped down to the bank, joining a road so overgrown with grass that they had not been able to see it from the river. The track, filled with ancient ruts and a few that looked more recent, curved away up into the woods. Sam looked back. Jongleur was still behind them, his slow stride that of a man walking into a dark and doomful place.

They caught up with Azador as he passed under the edge of the trees.

"I think it is time to stop," !Xabbu told him. "It is getting dark, and we are tired."

Azador turned to regard him with strangely mild eyes. "It's just ahead."

"What is just ahead?"

"There will be fires—many fires. The horses will be brushed, shiny. All the band will be wearing their finest clothes. And singing!" He seemed to be talking to someone else: his eyes had returned to the winding track between the trees. "Shoon! Listen! I can almost hear them!"

Sam, on the edge of a question, closed her mouth. She heard nothing but the velvety rubbing of the wind through countless branches.

Azador's face showed that he too was listening; after a moment, his gaze grew troubled. "No, I cannot. Perhaps we are not close enough yet."

Sam was footsore, exhausted. They had spent all of a long wearying day searching for the bridge, and now that they had crossed it she certainly did not want to want to spend the rest of the night following Azador through the wilderness as he searched for magic elves or forest musicians or whatever it was he was seeking. She was about to tell him so, but something in his eyes, a haunted but also hopeful look unlike anything she had seen in him so far, kept her quiet.

The forest was more real than anything since they had first reached the black mountain, the trees almost perfect, although where she could see their upper branches in the fading light the leaves were not sharp and individual, but seemed to blur into a cloudy mass. Still, there was recognizable grass underfoot, even if thicker and more like a lawn than what Sam guessed you would find in a real wild wood, and moss on the stones and tree trunks. The only thing that seemed distinctly wrong was the absence of wind or bird or cricket sounds. The woods were as silent as an empty church.

Azador led them on, lifting his hands before him wonderingly as though to touch the things he saw, lost in some kind of waking dream. Even Jongleur seemed struck by the strangeness of their forest journey, bringing up the back of the tiny procession in silence.

"Where are we?" Sam whispered, but !Xabbu had stopped, wide-eyed. A piece of pale cloth dangled beside the path, rippling in the faint breeze, "Chizz—is it from Renie?"

!Xabbu's face fell, "It cannot be. The color is wrong, more yellow than what you and she are wearing, and there is too much of it."

But the strip of cloth seemed to mean something to Azador, who reached out and touched it carefully, then left the wide track and struck out across the woods. He was moving quickly now; Sam and !Xabbu had to hurry to keep up.

A piece of blood-red fabric dangled on a shrub; Azador turned left. A hundred paces later two white strips side by side marked one edge of a clearing. Azador turned his back on them and walked out the other side. They emerged from a screen of trees onto a hillside and found the woodland road again, or one much like it, torn with the passage of many wheels.

They followed this track down into a grove of tall trees with twisted gray trunks. Now Sam could smell smoke. Inside the dense ring of trees, hidden from anyone outside, stood the wagons.

At first Sam thought they had stumbled on some odd kind of circus. Even in the dying light the wagons were stunning, two dozen or more, painted with many colors in almost unbelievable combinations, striped and swirled and checked, festooned with feathers and tassels, brass fittings on the wheels and doors. So splendid was the sight that it took her a moment to realize something was wrong.

"But . . . where is everybody?"

Azador groaned, staring around wildly as he entered the clearing, as though the crowd of people and horses who brought the wagons to this place might be hiding behind a tree. Sam and !Xabbu followed him. Azador stopped and stiffened, then bolted across the open ground. A wavering line of smoke drifted up from behind one of the farthest wagons, a somber vehicle by comparison to the rest, painted in deep midnight blue and dotted with white stars.

A small fire burned in a circle of stones on the ground beside the wagon. A set of steps had been unfolded between the high wooden wheels. On the bottom step, smoking a pipe and wearing a bonnet, sat what Sam at first thought was an old woman; only as she got closer did she notice that the stranger was slightly transparent around the edges.

Azador stopped in front of the figure and sank into a crouch before her. "Where have they gone?"

The woman looked up. Sam felt a chill. What she could see of the woman's face looked as smoky as the gray plumes curling above the fire, the eyes only points of light, small but bright as the coals at the edge of the fire pit.

"You come back to us, Azador." Her voice was strangely resonant, not at all as insubstantial as the rest of her. "Out of time, my chabo, my ill-omened one. Your name proves a true name. They all are gone."

"Gone?" The misery in his voice was palpable. "All?"

"All. The morts and their mards, all the children. They have run ahead of the Ending. As you see, some were so fearful they even left their vardoni behind." She looked to the wagons and shook her head in disapproval. Azador seemed stunned. Clearly leaving without these bright, beloved vehicles was a sign of something very dire. "And at the last, here you are. It was an unlucky day when you left. Now it is an equally unlucky day when you return."

"Where . . . where have they gone, Stepmother?"

"The Ending is coming. All the Romany have gone to the Well. The One has commanded it. They hope when they get there, the Black Lady will speak to them, tell them some way to save themselves."

"But why are you still here, Stepmother?"

"I could not rest until all my chabos had been told. It was my task. Now that you are back, after all these years, my task is ended." She stood up and mounted slowly to the door of her wagon. "Now at last I can go."

"But how do I get to the Well?" Azador was on the verge of tears. "I can remember so little. Will you take me with you?"

She shook her head; for a moment the light of her eyes was shrouded. "I am not going there. My task is ended." She began to turn away, then hesitated. "Always I knew your destiny was a strange one, an unhappy one, my lost chabo. When you were born, I read the leaves—oh, what sadness! He will die by his own hand, but unwillingly, that is what they told me. But perhaps it can be different. Now, when all is coming to an end, when even the One himself is dying, who can say what will happen?"

"How do I reach the Well?" Azador asked again. "I cannot remember."

"You of all the Romany, who left the world of his forefathers to go who knows where—you can find your way. Not across the world but through it. Inward. To the place where you touch the One, as we all do." It was impossible to read expressions in the smoky countenance, but Sam thought the next words might almost be spoken with a smile. "Perhaps you will even reach the place before the rest of your people. Just like the Unlucky One that would be, eh? To leave after the others, but to reach the Ending first?" She nodded, then stepped into the darkness of her wagon. Azador dragged himself to his feet, one hand stretched toward the place where the thing he called his stepmother had, stood, but the firelight flickered and the wagon faded until all that could be seen were the pale painted stars that had decorated its side, hanging in the air like the dying image of a pyrotechnic display. Then even the stars were gone.

Azador fell down into the dirt and sobbed. Sam reached for !Xabbu's hand and held it. She did not understand what had happened, but she knew what a broken heart looked like.

 

Azador was clearly not going to be much use for a while. Sam was helping !Xabbu gather more wood—the stepmother's campfire at least had remained—when she noticed Jongleur was gone.

"That's impacted!" she said. "He waited till we were distracted, then ditched us!"

"Perhaps." !Xabbu did not seem convinced. "Let us look."

They found the old man sitting against a tree at the edge of the clearing, as coldly serene as a statue. He was so still that for a moment, until he flicked them with an expressionless glance, Sam thought he might have had a stroke. She was mildly disappointed to discover it was not true, but could not help thinking there had been something odd about his behavior all day.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "You could at least come help us set up camp."

"No one asked me." Jongleur rose stiffly and began to walk toward where the firelight flickered along the trunks of the trees. "Is that thing gone?"

"What Azador called the stepmother? Yes, it is gone," !Xabbu said. "Do you know what it was?"

"No. But I can guess. A function of the operating system, meant to instruct and assist. A cracked version of the things we built into many of our simulation worlds."

"Like Orlando's Trojan tortoise," said Sam, remembering. She started to explain to !Xabbu, but realized suddenly that she did not want to talk about her dead friend in front of the old man.

Just because I'm feeling a little sorry for Azador, I don't have to let it spread over to the old murderer, too.

"Do you think it spoke with the voice of the One, then?" !Xabbu asked. When he saw the sour look on Jongleur's face, he amended it to, "With the voice of the operating system?"

"Perhaps." Despite his scowl, the old man had only a little of his usual fierceness, and in fact seemed troubled. Had something in Azador's misery touched even Jongleur's heart, which Sam imagined to be as small, dark, and hard as a charcoal briquette? It seemed difficult to believe.

Azador did not look up at them when they joined him at the fire, nor would he respond to any of Sam's or !Xabbu's questions. The moon had risen into the sky and now stood framed between the black hands of the trees, the stars small but bright behind it.

Sam was nodding with fatigue, and wondering if it would be too utterly creepy to sleep in one of the empty wagons, when Azador suddenly began to talk.

"I . . . I do not remember everything," he said slowly. "But when I found the bridge, much began to come back to me, as though I saw the cover of a book I had read as a child but had forgotten.

"I remember that I grew up here, in these woods. But also I roamed with my family through all the countries. We crossed the rivers, took our wagons to villages and towns in search of work. We did what needed doing. We had enough to live. And when we came together here, at Romany Fair, all was music and laughing—all the Romany together." For a moment there was light in his face, a memory of better things, but it faded. "But I never felt that I belonged—never could I accept that this was my life, the whole of it. I was unhappy even when I was happy. 'Azador,' all the Romany called me. It is an old Spanish Gypsy word, I think. It means to make ill luck, to bring mischance. But still they were kind to me, my family, my people. They knew it was destiny that made me so, not my choice."

"What is your real name?" !Xabbu asked gently.

"I . . . I do not know. I do not remember."

Even Jongleur was listening intently, an avid look on his hawklike features.

Azador abruptly sat up straight and his face darkened with anger. "That is all I can tell you. Why do you do this to me? I did not wish to come back here. Now I have again lost all the things that I lost once before."

"She said you could follow them," Sam reminded him. "Your stepmother. She said you could follow them to . . . what was it? A well?"

"They are making a pilgrimage to Kali the Black," Azador said with a scornful laugh. "But they might as well have flown to the stars. I do not know how to get there, except to walk. We are far from the center, where the Well is—we would have to cross river after river. The world would be gone before we were halfway there."

"Do you remember nothing else?" !Xabbu leaned forward. "I met you far away, in another part of the network. You must have crossed great distances to get there. How did you do it?"

Azador shook his head. "I remember nothing. I lived here. Then I wandered in other lands. Now I am back . . . and my people are gone." He scrambled to his feet so violently that he kicked leaves into the fire, which jumped and sputtered. "I am going to sleep. If the One is merciful, I will not wake up."

He strode away. They heard the creak of leather springs as he climbed into one of the wagons.

"Didn't . . . didn't his stepmother say he might kill himself?" Sam asked worriedly. "I mean should we leave him alone?"

"Azador will not commit suicide," Jongleur said in a flat voice. "I know his type." He too rose and walked off between the wagons.

Sam and !Xabbu looked at each other across the camp-fire. "Is it my imagination," Sam asked, "or is the scan factor just, like, rocketing upward every minute?"

"I do not understand you, Sam."

"I mean, are things getting crazier and crazier?"

"No, I do not think you are imagining it." !Xabbu shook his head. "I am puzzled myself, and worried, but I am also hopeful. If all are being drawn to some place called the Well, then perhaps Renie will be going there, too."

"But we don't know how to get there. Azador said by the time we walked there, the world is going to have ended."

!Xabbu nodded sadly, but then manufactured a smile, even more admirable for the effort behind it. "But it has not happened yet, Sam Fredericks. So there is hope." He patted her. "You go sleep now—if you choose that wagon, I can see it from the fire. I wish to think."

"But. . . ."

"Sleep now. There is always hope."

 

Sam woke from a troubled sleep into a world of mist and shadow.

In the dream, her parents had been explaining that Orlando couldn't come with them on the camping trip because he was dead, and even though he was standing right there looking sad, he still wouldn't fit in the car because his Thargor body was too big. Sam had been angry and embarrassed, but Orlando had only smiled and rolled his eyes, sharing a silent joke with her about parents, then faded away.

When she sat up, rubbing tears from her eyes, and stumbled out of the wagon, it was into a world without daylight.

"!Xabbu!" Her voice echoed back to her. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

To her immense relief he appeared from around the corner of the wagon. "Sam, are you all right?"

"Chizz. I just didn't know where you were. What time is it?"

He shrugged. "Who can say here? A night has passed, and this is as much morning as we are going to get, it seems."

She looked out at the wet grass, the white tendrils of mist between the trees, and felt a thrill of fear. "It's all shutting down, isn't it?"

"I don't know, Sam. It seems a strange way for a simulation to behave. But it does not make me happy, no."

"Where are the others?"

"Azador went away early this morning, but came back. Now he is sitting in the center of the meadow and will not talk to me. Jongleur has gone out walking too." !Xabbu looked tired. Sam wondered if he'd had any sleep at all, but before she could ask him, a tall, gaunt, and mostly naked shape appeared out of the gray murk at the edge of the clearing.

"We can wait here no longer," Jongleur announced before he had even reached them. "We will leave this place now."

In the real world, Sam thought sourly, you got breakfast. In this world, you got a two-hundred-year-old mass murderer spouting orders at you before your eyes were all the way open. "Yeah? How are we going to do that?"

Jongleur barely glanced at her. "Azador can take us to the operating system," he told !Xabbu. "You said that."

!Xabbu shook his head. "Not me. The . . . the stepmother told him he could. But he did not believe it."

"We will make him believe it."

"Are you going to torture him or something?" Sam demanded. "Trick him?"

"I think I can help him find the way," Jongleur said coolly. "Torture is unnecessary."

"Oh, you're going to show him how to do it?"

"Sam," !Xabbu said quietly.

"Your manners are typical of your generation. That is to say, nonexistent." Jongleur glanced at Azador, sitting a few dozen meters away, looking bleakly out at the forest. He lowered his voice. "Yes, I will do it. I built this system in the first place, and I have learned a few things now about this backwater section of it." He turned to !Xabbu. "Azador is a construct, a pet of the operating system, as is all this world. You proved that, to your credit." Disturbingly, he tried to smile. Sam thought of crocodiles. "He will have within him a direct connection of some sort, even if he is not aware of it. 'To the place where you touch the One, as we all do,' the stepmother-program said. Am I right?"

!Xabbu looked at him carefully for a moment, then shrugged. "So how will we do this?"

"We must find the next river. Those are the crossing points, the connections, like the gateways we built into the Grail system. The rest you must leave to me."

"How did you know what the stepmother said, anyway?" Sam asked suddenly. "You didn't listen to her. You went off by yourself."

Jongleur's face was a mask.

"You've been talking to Azador already, haven't you?" she said, answering her own question. "Just utterly whispering In his ear."

"He does not trust you," Jongleur said calmly. "He is unhappy, and feels you forced him to come here."

"Oh, and you're his friend now? He wants to kill all the Grail people. Did you mention that you had a little something to do with that?"

!Xabbu laid a hand on her arm. Across the foggy expanse of grass, Azador had turned to look at them. "Quietly, Sam, please."

For a brief moment Jongleur seemed about to respond with an equal measure of fury, then the storm building inside him calmed, or was suppressed. "Does it matter what he would really think of me? We need him. This part of the network—perhaps the whole thing—is dying. You said yourself that I was useless, girl. Perhaps I have been that so far, although I think your absent friend might remember that I saved her life on the mountain. Can I not contribute something now?" He fixed her with his cold, clear stare. "What will it hurt if I try, other than your pride?"

Sam could not help staring back. There was something odd in Jongleur's stiff manner, something off-kilter and discomforted. He's been funny ever since we followed Azador here, she thought. Could he actually be, like, turning into a human being a little bit?

She doubted it, but despite her dislike and distrust of the man, could not really argue with what he said. "I guess we have to do . . . something." She looked at !Xabbu, but the small man showed little reaction except to nod briefly.

"Good." Jongleur clapped his hands together. The crack echoed through the gloomy clearing. "Then it is time to set off."

"Just one thing," Sam said. "There were some clothes left in the wagon I slept in. If it's going to stay dark around here, it's going to be cold, so I'm going to find something to wear."

Jongleur did not smile again, for which Sam was grateful, but he nodded his approval. "As long as we do it swiftly, that is a good idea." He glanced down briefly at his own sarong of reeds and leaves. "The novelty of simply having a body has worn off. I grow weary of being scratched by branches and thorns. I will find some clothes as well."

 

Although the garments in Sam's wagon had been colorful, even gaudy, Felix Jongleur managed to find an old and somewhat threadbare black suit and collarless white shirt in one of the other wagons. Sam thought he looked like a preacher or an undertaker out of a net Western,

Bowing to the trend, !Xabbu had discarded his own brief kilt of woven leaves for a pair of pants only a few shades darker than his own golden skin, but had stopped there.

Sam inspected the blue satin pants and ruffled shirt she had selected—the best she could find, but nothing she would have been caught dead in at home. Like the back end of the world's saddest, most impacted parade, that's what we look like.

A quiet conversation with Jongleur had apparently reconciled Azador to the old man's plan. Whatever emotions the place had provoked in him, he did not look back as he led them out of the clearing and away from the circle of brightly painted wagons. Sam could not help taking a final, yearning glance at the ghostly vehicles, which seemed almost to float above the misty grass. It had been nice to sleep in a bed, however small and confined. She wondered if she would ever get the chance again.

Azador led them on a long winding trek through the forest, a journey that would have lasted until long past noon if anything like noon had ever come. The light remained minimal and diffuse, the forest a twilit haze. A few weak little lights like dying fireflies pulsed in the treetops but added nothing to the cold gray world.

Sam had grown so weary of stumbling through the damp, dark woods that she was about to scream, if only to hear a sound that wasn't dripping water or their own scuffing feet, when Azador stopped them.

"There is the river," he said dully, pointing downhill through a break in the trees. The gray water did not shine, and looked more like the mark of a broad pencil than the lively stream they had seen elsewhere. "But even if I find the bridge, it will only lead us to the next country, far from the center where the Well is."

"I suspect we were far from Romany Fair when you found the last bridge," Jongleur said. "Not in the country beside it. Am I right?"

Azador seemed tired and confused. "I suppose. I do not know."

"You found Romany Fair because it was where you wanted to go. Just as you found your way out of these worlds in the first place. Am I right?"

Azador swayed. He lifted his hands to cover his face. "It is too hard for me to remember. I have lost everything."

Jongleur took his arm. "I will speak to him alone," he told Sam and !Xabbu. The old man dragged Azador along the hill, out of earshot, then leaned close to his face as though forcing the attention of an unwilling child; Sam almost thought Jongleur would take the Gypsy's chin in his hand to keep him from looking away.

"Why can't he talk in front of us? I don't trust him, do you?"

"Of course I do not trust," !Xabbu said. "But there is something different in him. Have you seen that?"

Sam admitted she had. They watched as Jongleur finished his harangue and led Azador back toward them.

"We are going to find the bridge now," Jongleur said flatly. Azador looked stunned and exhausted, like someone who had given up arguing because he knew he could not win. He glanced at Sam and !Xabbu as though he had never seen them before, then turned and began to make his way down the steep, forested slope.

"What did you tell him?" Sam demanded between breaths.

"A way to think." Jongleur did not elaborate.

They came out of the trees onto a slope just above the river. Azador stood with his arms limp at his sides, staring at a bridge.

"Lock me sideways," Sam said, panting. "He did it."

It was a covered bridge made of rickety wood, like a single small house stretched to absurdity across the dark, flat river. She could just see the spot where it touched the other bank through the mist hovering above the river, but she knew better by now than to assume that the hilly forest there, a mirror of the place where they stood, was their actual destination.

When they reached Azador, they discovered that his eyes were closed.

"I do not want to cross," he said quietly.

"Nonsense," Jongleur told him. "You want to find your people, don't you? You want to do what the One has commanded of you."

"My own end is there," Azador said miserably. "As it was foretold. I can feel it."

"You feel your own fear," Jongleur responded. "Nothing is achieved unless fear is overcome." He hesitated, then put his hand on Azador's arm—a more or less human gesture which surprised Sam almost as much as it startled the Gypsy. "Come. We all need you. I am sure your people need you, too."

"But. . . ."

"Even death can be outwitted," Jongleur said. "Did I not tell you that?"

Azador swayed. Sam could almost see him weakening. For a long moment she wondered whether she wanted him to give in or not.

"Very well," he said heavily. "I will go across."

"Good man." Jongleur squeezed his arm. The old man seemed excited, even anxious, but Sam could not imagine why. Her mistrust flared again, but he was already leading Azador onto the span.

Sam and !Xabbu followed a few steps behind. Within moments they had passed beneath the roof of the bridge. It was so dark inside that the gray twilight they had left behind now seemed bright afternoon by comparison. Sam found herself straining toward the single point of gray light hovering far in front of them, the opening at the bridge's other end. Her footsteps echoed in the small space. The bridge creaked beneath her.

"Wait a minute," she said. "If that's the light from the other end, how come we can't see Jongleur and Azador in front of us. . . ? !Xabbu?" She stopped. "!Xabbu?"

Even the point of light was wavering now, as though fog were drifting in from the river to fill the covered bridge. Sam's heart sped. She turned, but there was no longer a light behind her, either. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

She could hear nothing but the thumping of her heart and the soft creak of timbers beneath her feet. The darkness was so close, so strong, that Sam could feel it twining around her like a living thing. She put out her hands, searching for the bridge's walls, but her fingers touched only cold air. Panicked, she began to move forward, or what she thought was forward—slowly at first, but her cautious movements quickly gave way to a trot, then a breakneck run.

Right into the grip of something as strong as pain, as cold as regret.

Living fear caught her up like a huge dark fist. In a split-instant a deathly chill burrowed into her, numbing her body into nonexistence, until there was nothing of her left but a tiny flicker—a thought, a breath, struggling against the all-conquering nothing.

I've felt this before—inside the temple in the desert. But I didn't remember how . . . how bad. . . !

She was not alone. Somehow she could feel !Xabbu, and even Jongleur, as if they were all connected to her through the dark by some sputtering, fading circuit—!Xabbu drowning in emptiness, Jongleur shrieking in the shadows, snatching at the blackness as if to pull it into some more coherent shape—but it was only a glimmer, a moment. Then the others were gone and she was left alone, a dying spark.

Let me go, she thought, but there seemed nothing that could hear her or wanted to listen.

The force that held her squeezed, squeezed hard, and the void wrapped her and pulled her down. . . .

 

It was the park near her old house—a place she had not seen for years and years, but the swings and monkey bars were still as familiar as her own hands. She was sitting on the grass at the edge of the play area, in the bright sunshine, scuffing her bare feet in the sand and looking at the patterns it made, at the bits of tanbark sticking up through the pale drifts like flotsam on a frozen ocean.

Orlando was sitting beside her. Not the barbarian-hero Orlando, or even the wizened, cartoonish thing she had sometimes seen in her darker thoughts since learning about his illness, but the Orlando she had once imagined, the dark-haired boy with the thin, serious face.

"It doesn't want you," Orlando said. "It doesn't really care much about anything anymore."

Sam stared at him, trying to remember how she had come to be in such a place. All she could remember with any certainty was that Orlando was dead, which didn't seem like a very polite thing to bring up.

"I think if you can, you'd better get out," he continued, then bent to pluck a long grass stem.

"Get out. . . ?"

"Of where you are. It doesn't want you, Sam. It doesn't understand you. I think it's stopped trying."

The ground shuddered—just a little, but Sam felt it in her haunches, as though someone had struck the world a heavy blow, but far from where they sat. "I'm scared," she said.

"Of course you are." He smiled. It was just the kind of crooked smile she'd always imagined him having. "I would be, too, if I was still alive."

"Then, you know. . . ?"

He held up the stem of grass, then blew it out of his fingers. "I'm not really here, Sam. If I were, I'd be calling you 'Fredericks,' wouldn't I?" He laughed. His shirt, she could not help seeing with loving pity, was buttoned wrong. "You're just talking to yourself, pretty much."

"But how do I know about . . . about what it thinks?"

"Because you're inside it, scanmaster. You're in its mind, I guess you'd call it—way inside. In its dreams. And that's not a very good place to be right now."

The ground shuddered again, a more distinct rolling, as though something beneath them had discovered itself confined and was chafing against its restraints. The rings on the monkey bars began to sway slowly,

"But I don't know how to get out!" she said. "There's nothing I can do!"

"There's always something you can do." His smile was sad. "Even if it's not enough." He got up and dusted off knees of his pants. "I have to go now."

"Just tell me what to do!"

"I don't know anything you don't know yourself," he explained, then turned and walked away across the grass, a field of green far more immense than what she remembered. Within moments the slightly awkward figure had diminished until she felt she could have reached out and picked him up in one hand.

"But I don't know anything!" she called after him.

Orlando turned. The day had grown dark, the sun lost behind clouds, and he was hard to see. "It's scared," he called back to her. Another rumble passed through the ground, bouncing Sam where she sat, but Orlando did not waver. "It's really scared. Remember that."

Sam tried to scramble after him but the earth beneath her feet had begun to pitch and she could not get her footing. For a moment she thought she had her balance under her at last, might be able to catch him before he disappeared—she had always been a fast runner, and Orlando was crippled, wasn't he?—then a vast black something came up from beneath the surface of the world, breaching the crumbling earth like a whale heaving up out of the ocean's dark underneath, and Sam was thrown headlong into the sagging, collapsing deeps.

 

The swift rasp, she realized at last, was the sound of her own terrified breath sawing in and out. She could feel dirt beneath her fingers, dirt against her face. She did not want to open her eyes, frightened that if she did she would see something staring back at her, something as big as all Creation.

It was the sound of someone gasping next to her that gave her the courage to look.

She was lying on her back beneath a purple-gray bruise of a sky, grimmer even than what had stretched above the forest. The ground beneath her felt hard and real. They were on a slope, surrounded by hills that looked something like the crown of the black mountain, a bleak landscape without vegetation.

Sam sat up. !Xabbu was on his hands and knees beside her, his face pressed against the earth, his chest expanding and contracting as if he were having a heart attack, sobs hitching in his throat. She crawled to him and put her arms around him.

"!Xabbu, it's me! It's Sam. Talk to me!"

The noises quieted a little. She could feel his compact body shuddering against her. At last he calmed. He turned toward her, his face wet with tears, but for a moment did not seem to recognize her.

"I am sorry," he said. "I have failed you. I am nothing."

"What are you talking about? We're alive!"

He stared, then shook his head. "Sam?"

"Yes, Sam. We're alive! Oh, God, I didn't think . . . I didn't know . . . but I did, I just forgot about it, like it was too painful or something. When I was in the temple in the desert with Orlando, it was just the same. . . ." She realized that !Xabbu was looking at her in confusion, and that she was babbling. "Never mind. I'm just so happy you're here!" She hugged him tightly, then sat up. She was still wearing her borrowed Gypsy finery, as was he. "But where are we?"

Before he could answer, they both heard a cry from farther down the slope. They climbed to their feet and made their way down the scree of dark, crumbling soil, and found Felix Jongleur on the other side of a small hillock. He was lying on his side with his eyes squeezed shut, writhing like a salted slug.

"No," the old man gasped, "you cannot. . . ! The birds . . . the birds will. . . !"

!Xabbu reached out a tentative hand. When it touched him. Jongleur's eyes snapped open.

"She is mine!" he shrieked, flailing at them. "She is. . . ." He stopped and his face crumpled. For a moment he seemed to look at !Xabbu and Sam without defenses, his eyes those of a hunted, desperate animal. Then the mask was back in place. "Do not touch me," he snapped. "Do not ever touch me. . . ."

"I have found it!" Azador shouted.

They turned. He was making his way up the hill toward them, bent against the steepness of the climb. When he lifted his head, his face was lit in an astonishing smile. "You were right! Come see!"

Sam looked to !Xabbu, who shrugged and nodded. As Jongleur was still raising himself to his feet with chilly if unsteady determination, they followed Azador back down the slope.

In a few minutes they had reached a place where they could look out across the last of the small hills to see the bowl-shaped valley as a whole. Like the ring of hills, it bore more than a passing resemblance to the top of the black mountain, but instead of a huge, pinioned figure, the valley was dominated by a monstrous crater filled with black water and strangely muted lights. A crowd of figures too distant to make out huddled along its rim.

"What . . . what is it?" Sam asked at last.

"It is the Well," said Azador triumphantly. He turned and clapped Jongleur on the shoulder so hard he almost knocked the old man over. "You were right! You are a wise, wise man." He turned and pointed. "Do you see them all down there? All the children of the One have gathered. The Romany will be there, too. My people!"

As if he had exhausted his patience waiting to show them, Azador now went scrambling down the hillside toward the plain, leaving Sam and the others stunned and staring.