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"It can't slow down," Florimel groaned from the boards beside him. "The wagon will run over it. Find the brake!"
"Brakes? On a wagon?"
"Great God, of course there is!" She clambered past Paul and leaned across T4b's lap. She grabbed something there and pulled up. There was a groaning noise and for a moment the wheels dug, then rolled again, but this time a little more slowly.
"Damn," said Paul. "I can't tell you how happy I am you knew that."
They were still rolling downhill at a whistling pace, but all four wheels now remained in contact with the ground. Paul, Martine, and Florimel dragged themselves back into the center of the wagon bed as the rocky hillside rushed past.
"Everybody all right?" Paul asked.
Martine groaned. "I have scraped most of the skin off my hands. Otherwise, I will live."
"Hey!" shouted T4b. "What about some charge for the driver?"
"What?" Florimel rubbed bruised knees. "Is he asking for drugs?"
"Charge!" T4b said, and laughed. "You know, rep!"
Paul, who was at least glancingly conversant with street slang, was the first to figure it out. "Thanks. He wants us to thank him,"
"Thank him?" Florimel growled. '"I would give him a painful spanking if I didn't worry we'd go over the cliff."
T4b scowled. "Didn't get eat by no snake, you. What's your boohoo?"
"You did a good job, Javier," Martine said. "Just keep your eyes on the road, please."
Paul spread his legs to brace himself, then leaned against the front of the wagon bed, watching the hill road wind away behind them. The sun was dazzlingly bright, only an eyelash short of noon. Raw metal glinted here and there in the ragged landscape.
"I doubt that either that snake or the horse pulling us were part of the original package for this place," he said. "Does that remind you of anything?" He was startled by a line of black appearing on the ridge beside them. It took a moment before he realized it was some kind of cable. He raised himself on his elbows and turned to look ahead. The cable paralleled the road, stretched along sentinel tree trunks.
Telephones? Not in Dodge City. Telegraph, must be. He eased himself back and watched the hill road and the line of black sliding away behind them.
"It is like Kunohara's world," Florimel said. "Those mutations he said had just begun there. Perhaps Dread has done something like that here as well."
"That would be a quick and perhaps amusing way to spoil things," Martine said. She spoke slowly, obviously still tired and sore. "And he has so many worlds to ruin. Just turn up a few randomizing factors, perhaps, then sit and watch someone's carefully-crafted simulation turn into something bizarre."
Another telegraph line now hung below the first, twin black streaks along the left side of Paul's vision. The wagon rattled and lurched down the stony road. Paul groaned. It was hard to imagine a less comfortable way to travel—he was surprised he hadn't broken any teeth with all the jaw-snapping bounces. "Can't we go any slower?"
"Not if you want Mister Horse in front of this ride," T4b said crossly.
Now there were telegraph lines along the canyon rim as well, so that the wagon rolled between two high, sparse fences of black cables. Paul wondered if this was another misshaping of the original simulation, and if so, what weird communication ran along these extra cables. Or were they merely empty copies?
"I think I see a town," Florimel said. "See, down at the bottom of the canyon."
Paul clambered to the edge of the wagon and squinted. The sun's glare off the canyon walls was fierce, making the river at the bottom a twisting line of silvery fire, but there was certainly something along the river's edge just before the canyon bent and blocked the rest of the river valley from view, something that seemed too regular to be stone on the canyon floor.
"Martine, can you tell if that's really a town—Dodge City, or whatever this is? I can't see it very well."
"We will reach it soon enough." She reached up and rubbed listlessly at her temples. "Forgive me."
"What in hell is going on?" Florimel said.
For a moment Paul thought she was talking about Martine's unwillingness to come look; then he saw that just ahead another half-dozen cables ran in from the hillside and then bent off a leaning pole and stretched over the top of the roadway like a musical staff with no notes. An instant later they were bouncing along beneath the awning of black lines, and Paul could not help seeing that the cables now surrounded them on all sides. They hung loosely, a meter or two of empty space between each pair, so they were not in any way trapped, but it was still an unsettling sight.
"I don't know," Paul belatedly answered Florimel. "But I don't like it very much. . . ." He looked up past T4b just as the wagon rounded a bend, still traveling in a tube of telegraph cables. The young man swore and jerked back hard on the reins. Their horse was already trying to slow up, but the weight of the wagon behind it was too much and the creature's knob-knuckled feet were furrowing the roadway.
Just a few dozen meters ahead the cables all ran together, knotted in a crooked black mandala across the middle of the wide road. It looked like. . . .
"Christ!" shouted Florimel, tumbling as the horse tangled in the traces and the wagon began to sway alarmingly. "What. . . ?"
It looked like a huge spiderweb.
"Get out!" Paul shouted. The horse had bolted to the i
Martine was wrapped around his legs. The wagon bed was tilting up sideways, lifting them inexorably toward the canyon side of the road. Paul bent down and grabbed the blind woman, then did his best to climb to the rising side of the wagon, hoping to leap out toward the hillside, but Martine's weight was too much for him.
One of the wagon wheels snapped with a noise like a gunshot. A splintered piece of spoke arrowed past his face and the whole wagon groaned like a wounded animal as it tumbled onto its side.
Paul had no chance to pick spots. He grabbed Martine and flung himself off the wagon bed. Something sticky caught at him, sagging beneath his weight, and for a moment he had the alarming sight of nothing but empty air beneath him, of the full vertiginous drop down the crazy-banded side of the canyon. He half-slid, half-fell down the row of cables until he was sitting in a painful, twisted position in the roadway, stuck at the nexus point of two of the black bands, with Martine lying motionless across his lap.
Before he could even look for the others, the wagon and the trapped, tethered horse rolled into the web of cable blocking the roadway, flinging up a dense cloud of dust. One of the horse's legs was obviously broken; it writhed helplessly in the wreckage of the wagon, a mess of kicking black fur and splintered wood dangling from the sticky web.
Then the web's builders appeared—hairy gray-and-brown shapes climbing up from the canyon or down the hillside, scuttling along the strands like spiders.
Spiders would have been bad enough. These things had the faces of dead buffalo, with hanging tongues and rolling eyes, atop their malformed, many-limbed bodies. Worst of all, they were even more clearly part-human than the insect-monsters of Kunohara's world. They hissed with hungry pleasure as they advanced down the swaying cables. The first of them to reach the middle of the web began to pull the living horse apart, bickering in wet, piping voices over the best bits, ignoring the creature's agonized squeals as they began to feed.
Paul tried to drag himself upright, but the sticky cables held him like a strong hand.