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"I think I have it," Martine finally a
They followed her small, shrouded figure through the drifts like a group of lost mountaineers trying to slay close to their Sherpa guide. T4b was the slowest, making his way along the river shore with the boat's rope, pulling the little craft against the current. He had been quiet much of the trip, even his usual litany of complaints muted, so much so that Paul wondered if the young man were going through some kind of personality change.
Paul could not help remembering a young soldier in his squadron, a lad from Cheshire with a thin, girlish face and a habit of talking about his family back home as though everyone in the trenches knew them and wanted to hear what they said and thought. The first bad bombardment had silenced him quite thoroughly. After seeing the reality of what the Germans wanted to do to them all, he became as miserly of speech as the most confirmed misanthrope in the trenches.
Six weeks later he had been killed by an artillery shell at Savy Wood. Paul could not remember him having spoken for days beforehand.
Startled, he pulled up. Martine had stopped in front of him and was studying the swirling mists with her blind eyes as though reading directions on a street sign.
What are you going on about? Savy bloody Wood? That isn't real—or your memories aren't, anyway. It was all make-believe.
But it felt real. The details of the World War One simulation he retained felt no different than the recovered memories of his real life, either the musty routine of his job at the Tate or his strange year in Jongleur's tower fortress.
So how do you know any of those memories are real? It was a question he didn't want to face, especially not here, in icy mists that might have cloaked the edge of the world, the reefs of Limbo. How do you know? How do you know Paul Jonas is even your real name—that anything you think happened actually happened?
"Step forward." Martine's croaking voice sent the phantoms flying. "We must hold hands as we step through, just to be sure."
"Did you find Egypt?" Paul reached out and took Florimel's callused fingers, even as she clutched T4b's free hand.
"Just s–step forward with m–m–me—I will explain when we p–pass through. Hurry! I f–feel like I am fr–freezing to death!"
As they walked forward, tangles of unsteady blue light curled up between their feet; sparks vibrated in the air like drunken fireflies. Paul felt the static lifting his hair.
Every detail, he marveled. They thought of every detail. . . .
Twenty paces later he stepped through into burning air and sunshine that struck him like a hammerblow.
The river still flowed, but hundreds of meters below them now, glinting in harsh sunlight at the bottom of a raw, red mud canyon. The dirt road on which they stood was less than a dozen meters wide. It felt something like being on the trail up the side of the black glass mountain once more.
"It is . . . the index said this is. . . ." Martine sounded a little dazed. "Dodge City. Is that not a place in the old American West?"
Paul's whistle of surprise was interrupted by a loud yelp of alarm from T4b. They turned to see the young man stumbling back from what had been their boat, but was now a large wagon on spoked wheels. Odd as the transformation was, it was not so much the wagon that seemed to have startled him as the beast yoked to the wagon.
"W–w–was holdin' the rope on the boat, like," T4b stuttered as he halted beside Paul. "We come through, holdin' that instead!"
The shaggy black creature in the traces had something of the shape of a horse, but its back legs were too large and its front legs had knuckled hands like those of a great ape. Its face was long, but not as long as a horse's, and tiny ears lay close to the sides of its bulging forehead.
"What is it?" Paul asked. The creature had bent to graze on dry grass beside the narrow dirt road. "Something extinct?"
"Nothing I have ever seen," Florimel said. "Not with fingers, no. I think it is something made up."
"None of this is what I expected." Martine swiveled her sightless gaze back over the canyon. On the far side, contorted shapes that Paul had briefly taken for human watchers, but which now he saw were cacti, stood along the ridgeline. "I . . . do not think there were such large mountains in Kansas, even in the nineteenth century."
"Why are we here?" Paul was grateful for the hot sun—he was even begi
"To imitate the old joke," Martine said, "there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the Egypt sim-world still exists, or at least it is still on the index. The bad is that we could not get to it from the Arabian Nights world."
"Can we reach it from this one?"
"Not if we go all the way through," she said. "The river gate at the end of this simulation opens to something called 'Shadowland'—or once did, anyway. But there appeared to be a secondary gate, the kind that would be somewhere in the middle of the simulation, that we can use."
"And that will take us to Egypt?"
"Yes, as far as I could tell. It is hard to be certain because some of the codes that indicated status were indecipherable to me. But I believe the chances are good."
"Hey!" T4b shouted. "Op this!" He had wandered a sort distance back up the sloping road and was peering at something in the dry grasses. "Hole in the ground, but with like a frame around it. Some kind of treasure dungeon, something."
"Stay with us, Javier," Florimel called to him. "That sounds like a mine shaft. It will not be safe."
"So what now?" Paul asked. "Where do you think this other gateway is?"
Martine shrugged. "If this simworld is named Dodge City, I would think that the city would be a good place to start looking." She pointed down the canyon. "If we are at one edge of the simulation, then it must be in that direction. Do you see anything?"
"Not from here." He turned to Florimel. "Do you know anything about horses? If that's what that thing is supposed to be?"
She favored him with a grim smile. "I have dealt with a few. Again, the benefits of growing up on a rural commune. Why don't you throw the rugs into the back so we have something to sit on?" She turned and shouted down the road to T4b, where the top of his black-haired head showed above the long weeds. His arm went up and down, as though he were waving at something. "Damn you, Javier, if you fall down in there and break your legs, I am not going to pull you out. Come and help us."
"Deep, utter," T4b said as he rejoined them few moments later. "Took that rock like about a minute to hit the bottom."
"Jesus," Paul said in weary a
They piled into the wagon. Florimel had indeed managed to gentle the horselike creature, although Paul thought it looked at the rest of them with something less than trust as she climbed up onto the bench and took the reins. When the rest of the company was seated on the hard boards she clicked her tongue softly and the creature began to move down the gentle incline. The road was narrow and the canyon opened starkly to their left, a fall that would last several seconds should any of them be unlucky enough to try it, and Paul was glad of the beast's deliberate pace.
"It is so strange," Florimel said. "It is a river valley, but it seems so . . . raw." Indeed, the edges of the canyon wall, banded in red and brown and orange, glistened like meat. "So new."
"I've never been here," Paul said, "I mean, in the real world, but I agree with Martine—I don't think there are many mountain ranges in Kansas. T4b? Do you know anything about it?"