Now she was on the bridge. All she needed to do was walk on across. But he feared that something was still wrong.
“This doesn’t seem right,” Nia said.
“Yes, it doesn’t,” he agreed. Then he thought of something. She was closing her eyes against the illusion, but he wasn’t seeing the illusion. How could he guide her safely though it without seeing it himself? Maybe that did not make logical sense, but it made subjective sense.
He stepped forward and stood on the edge of the bridge. The illusion appeared; he seemed to be dangerously perched high above the landscape. She was there too, the rope walkway precariously narrow. A gust of wind even seemed to be blowing at her skirt.
“Take another step,” he said. “Toward me.”
She took another step, but now she was too close to the edge on the right side. “Take a half step to your left,” he said, keeping his voice calm.
She took the half step, and was back in the center.
“Another step toward me.”
She took the step. But now there was something else. Something was flying toward the walkway. Something big. In fact it was a dragon.
But it couldn’t actually touch her, could it? Its purpose must be to scare her into a misstep, make her react involuntarily. It simply had to be ignored.
“Stand where you are,” he said. “Do not move.”
She stood still.
The dragon loomed close. It was huge, large enough to pick her up in its claws and carry her away. It seemed to be determined to do exactly that. It swooped down, grabbed for her—
And passed on through her without contact. Dell had flinched, but Nia had not, because she didn’t see it.
“Take another step toward me,” he said.
The dragon looped in air and gaped its mouth. It fired a blast of fire. The jet scored right on Nia—and didn’t touch her, though Dell flinched again.
“One more step,” he said.
She took it, and reached him at the end. He put his arms about her. “You made it.” For part of a moment she felt like a young woman, though of course she was not.
She turned in his arms and gazed back. “A dragon!” she exclaimed. “Was it strafing me?”
“An illusion dragon,” he said. “I—I gambled that neither it nor its fire were real. I won.”
“We won,” she said, shuddering. “I’d have jumped off the walkway.”
He stepped back off the bridge, bringing her with him. “We won,” he agreed.
The illusion disappeared. Dell relaxed with relief, feeling as if he were melting.
“I couldn’t have done it with anyone else,” Nia said, disengaging. “I know you. I trust you. You came through for me.”
“Thank you.”
“But I am curious about something.” She knelt, then reached toward the brink of the chasm, touching the edge of its void. “I was right: this too is illusion.”
“Oh?” Dell squatted and touched it. There was solid ground. No void.
No wonder the pools had vanished so readily. Everything was illusion.
They walked on along the path. Three down, Dell thought. Three to go. Including himself.
The forest opened out into a barren glade. There was just one thing in it: a robot with a flaring funnel for a head. All else was dirt, as if everything on it had been scraped away.
“Uh-oh,” Kadence said. “I think this is my turn.”
The machine turned at the sound of her voice, orienting its funnel on her. Dell did not like the look of that.
“What do you think it is?” Santo asked. He was not being cynical; he simply wanted clarification.
“I think it’s a deletion machine,” Kadence said.
“A what?”
“When I first went back in time, to help defeat Ragna Roc, I saw what the big bird could do. He deleted folk just by looking at them. They became illusions, visible but unreal. Had he peered at me like that, he would have deleted me. I don’t know what would have happened then, but I fear I would never have come into existence. That oblivion has been my worst dread ever since. Ragna is now safely locked up, but I still fear nonexistence. That he will somehow catch me and delete me. I think this machine stands for that. I have to get past it somehow, and I’m afraid even to go near it.”
“Maybe we can test this,” Dell said. He looked around, and found several fallen pine cones on the ground. He picked one up and threw it at the machine.
The thing oriented on the cone and sucked it into the funnel. It disappeared and was gone.
Dell picked up a fallen branch. He heaved that at the machine. Again the funnel took it in. The thing did not seem to have a stomach; the funnel narrowed down almost to a point. Yet it had swallowed the branch.
“I think you’re right,” Dell said. “This is a vacuum machine that abolishes anything it sucks in. That must include living things, such as people.”
“We can’t get by it,” Santo said. “The path resumes on the other side of the gouged glade. Maybe I could make a hole to take it in.”
“No, it’s not your challenge,” Kadence said grimly. “It’s mine.”
“It’s yours,” Santo agreed, backing off.
“And I see only one way to deal with it.” She marched forward toward the vacuum machine. The funnel oriented hungrily on her.
“But it will delete you!” Santo said.
“Maybe not.”
They had to let her do it her way, dreading the result.
Kadence walked right up to the machine. And the funnel sucked her in headfirst. In half a moment she was halfway in, her feet sticking out behind. In a whole moment she was completely gone.
“Well, she conquered her fear,” Santo said. “But at what price?”
No one else could answer. They stared at the vacuum machine, appalled.
Dell had a special problem with this. If the point was to conquer fear, and she had done it, hadn’t she won? So why was she gone?
The machine shimmered. Then it changed. The funnel shrank into the body, becoming a mouth. The shape of the thing became girlish. In fact, it was Kadence!
“It deleted my body,” she said. “But not my spirit. So I remain, and it is gone. I deleted it.”
The others applauded. She had indeed prevailed. She had deleted her worst fear.
They walked on. Now they came to a stage. Before it was a vast audience of people: male, female, young, old, middle, thin, fat, average, of all colors and configurations. There seemed to be no common denominator.
The path led to and onto the stage. “Bleep!” Santo said. Because he was young that was not a cancellation of an expletive, but a word in itself.
“What’s so bad about a stage?” Dell asked.
“It’s my stage,” the boy said. “The one where I have to come out in public as gay. My worst fear.”
“Stage fright?”
“Worse. They will condemn and ridicule me for being different. I’d rather die.”
“You don’t have to do it. You can sit this one out.”
“And the rest of you won’t make it to the end of the path to get your answer.”
Dell saw the problem. It wasn’t terror, exactly, it was the fear of being shamed. And yet, as he saw it, unnecessary. “What do you care what a bunch of strangers think of you? Your friends don’t condemn you. Nan O’Tech didn’t condemn you. You don’t need those strangers.”
The boy considered. “I do need those strangers, because they represent humanity. My friends forgive my faults, but strangers don’t. If they don’t accept me, then I know I am not acceptable. There is no point in my existing.”
“Oh my brother,” Squid said. “I’m way more different than you are, and you accept me as I accept you. You have to exist.”
“You have to,” Win said tearfully. “We can’t make it wi
thout you.”
“You supported me,” Kadence said. “I need you too.”
Santo looked at them. “I don’t want to mess up you or the mission. But I can’t face that crowd. I would dissolve into glop on that stage and wash out anyway. What can I do?”
“I think this is a man thing,” Nia said. “You have to help him, Dell.”
And how was he to do that? He had no expertise dealing with either gay boys or hostile strangers.
Then he thought of something. “Like me, you’re just a spraint on the riverbank,” he told Santo. “Understand, and you’re halfway there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re all spraints. Poops on the bank. Accept that, and we’re halfway there.”
Santo looked at him blankly. So did the others
Dell tried again. “Everyone’s different in his own way. That’s the point. You think your difference condemns you, but it doesn’t, any more than Kadence being from her own future does, or Grania’s being old, or Squid being alien. Without those distinctions we would not any of us be individuals, we’d just be anonymous parts of the living mass. Poops on the bank. We need not only to accept our differences, but to be proud of them. Otherwise what’s the point in being in the scene? We need to be individuals, not cookie-cutter copies. Not mere spraints. Embrace your difference; it makes you what you are.”
Santo looked at the others. They nodded in cookie-cutter unison.
And it registered. “That’s the key. I’ll do it,” he said. He marched up to the stage, mounted the steps, and stood in the center facing the audience.
“That was beautiful,” Nia murmured. “Poop and all.”
“The riddle helped.”
Santo spoke. “My name is Santo, and I am gay.”
The disparate assembly suddenly found unity: in condemnation. They glowered at Santo as if he were not a boy of eleven but an obscene zombie cockroach defecating in public. “You choose your obnoxious lifestyle,” a voice called. “You can change it to become decent.”
“I am as I was made,” Santo continued boldly. “I can’t change any more than you can. I accept that. I hope when I am a man to find another man to love.”
The audience looked ready to torch the stage with him on it.
“Just as you are as you were made, each of you.” He looked at a young woman in the front row. “You’re pretty, with brown hair, red lips, and sparkling white teeth. No one else is quite like you, you can wow the boys, and you wouldn’t have it otherwise, would you?” The girl shook her head; she didn’t want to lose her attractive qualities. Then she faded out, leaving her chair empty.
“He persuaded her,” Nia whispered. “So she can no longer be part of a hostile crowd.”
So it seemed. Dell was amazed at how forcefully the boy was coming across.
Santo looked at an old man, with his old wife beside him. “You are ancient. You must have had a good life. Would you want to trade your loyal woman for a long life with a good man?”
“Hey!” the man said angrily, and the woman looked alarmed.
“Then why do you think I would want to trade my man for a woman? You are as fixed in your orientation as I am in mine. You follow the Golden Rule, don’t you? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? You leave me to my orientation and I will gladly leave you to yours. Neither one has to change the other.”
The man considered. Then he and his wife faded out, leaving two more empty chairs. So did several others scattered through the audience.
“He’s scoring,” Dell whispered, pleased.
Santo addressed two young men seated beside two young women. “How would you like to have the king make a law that you had to date each other, and the girls date each other? Would that suddenly change you, and you’d be satisfied?” All four of them looked angry. “So do you think I’d change if you just talked to me?”
The four looked at each other, and faded.
Santo continued, talking to each member of the audience personally, and they disappeared. Finally the chairs were all empty except one. An ordinary girl.
“You?” Santo asked. “Do you want to change?”
“No.”
“Do you condemn me?”
“No.”
He paused, perplexed. “Then what’s on your mind?”
“I was pretending, so I could get along. You proved I don’t have to. Now I’ll come out, the same as you have. I will find me another girl. Thank you.”
And as Santo stared, she faded out of the dream.
Now Dell and the others applauded. “You have made it through,” Nia said, advancing to hug him. “By making them ashamed, not yourself.”
“I didn’t think I could do it,” Santo said. “Until I pictured them all as spraints. Who’s afraid of a big bad spraint?”
They laughed, but it was a good question.
The stage had faded out, leaving only the path. They resumed walking.
Then it changed. Dell became the captain of a spaceship, the others lying in boxes. YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT, IS TO DELIVER A CARGO OF ROBOT PARTS TO PLANET X TO TERRAFORM IT FOR LATER HUMAN COLONIZATION. YOUR COMPANIONS ARE IN STASIS—THAT IS, DEEP FREEZE—FOR THE JOURNEY, AS THERE IS FOOD FOR ONLY ONE. THEY WILL BE REVIVED UPON ARRIVAL TO ASSEMBLE AND PROGRAM THE ROBOTS. YOU WILL TRAVEL TWO YEARS ALONE.
It was like a cold hand clutching his heart. “I can’t go alone!” Dell protested. “I can’t even sleep in a new place without someone holding my hand. I’m terrified of isolation.”
THEN ABORT THE MISSION AND GO HOME, LOSER. YOU ARE NOT THE MAN FOR IT. THE MISSION WILL BE LOST.
Which meant they wouldn’t make it to the end of the path, after all the others had come through. But two years alone? He couldn’t face that. He would go crazy, literally, and the ship would crash, losing the mission anyway.
There had to be a way. But what?
Dell had learned to be wary of either/or choices. Things were seldom all white or all black. There was usually a middle route, a shade of gray, or at least a different one.
Could he take his friends along alive? Then the food would run out a fifth of the way there, and they would all starve and the ship, unguided, would drift in space. That was no good.
He went to the cargo hold to look at the robot parts. He was surprised to discover several already assembled. “How come you’re not in boxes?” he asked one, a lady machine. He could tell she was female because she had iron gray hair to her shoulders, tied with a steel tape ribbon, a full blouse, a short skirt, and perfectly formed legs ending in magnetic slippers.
“We run the ship during travel,” she replied. “We are the service robots, not the terraforming ones. You give commands and we implement them, such as accelerating the ship, adopting a new azimuth—”
“A what?”
“Direction. And making spot repairs when tiny meteors punch holes in the shell, so your air does not whoosh out. You wouldn’t like that.”
“I wouldn’t,” Dell agreed. “You look remarkably, well female.” Indeed, she wore a snug blouse and skirt and looked quite human except for her soldering iron hands. “Is that necessary for plugging meteor holes?”
She smiled. “Not at all. We are multipurpose devices. I am Rosie the Riveter.” She pulled off an iron appendage and replaced it with a human hand. “Sometimes a pilot gets lonely, so we serve as company. I can be very soft when a pilot wishes.”
“Soft,” he repeated musingly, wondering whether that meant what it might mean.
“Girlfriend soft,” she clarified. “We are programmed to emulate the essential moves perfectly. We’ve never had a complaint. Simply give the command and I will join you in bed. I am at your service for servicing.” She took a deep breath, so that her blouse stretched tight. He might have freaked out, had he not known she was a robot.
&n
bsp; Could he have an ideal woman for two years? But she wouldn’t be real. That was no good.
Dell got a wild idea. “Rosie, could you emulate one of my friends? Like Grania?”
“One moment, please.” She put her human hands to her face and massaged it. In a scant two moments it became Nia’s face with its gray eyes, framed by brown hair. She plainly knew the correct model to follow. “Like this?” Nia’s voice asked.
Dell blinked. It was her face on a breathtakingly (so to speak) young body.
“Oh yes, but—”
“I’m not finished.” She put her hands to her torso and kneaded it. In another two moments it had thickened to resemble Nia’s body.
Oh my, he thought. He realized that he could have his friends with him after all. Except that the same thing that prevented his freak stopped him from really accepting it. The robot now looked exactly like Nia, but she wasn’t Nia; she was a soulless machine. He would know he was still alone.
What was he to do? He needed to accomplish the mission, but he needed more than robots to keep him company, however versatile they might be. This was the dream realm, but he knew that the two-year voyage would indeed feel like two years if he didn’t find a way around it. Where was his ideal shade of gray?
Then he got an idea. “Rosie, suppose there’s a problem with one of the living folk in stasis? A pinhole leak in the casket, maybe that doesn’t show, but the sleeper is in danger. How do you know?”
“They know. They’re in stasis, but their minds are minimally active. In effect, they are dreaming. In fact there are excellent programmed dreams for them, whole mundane type movies of adventure, romance, or horror. If there’s a problem they become agitated, and we pick up on that. We tune in, and they direct us to the problem, and we fix it. It’s very efficient.”
Dreamers dreaming in the dream. Well, why not? “So there is telepathic contact between you and the dreamers?”
“Yes. Mostly they aren’t interested in our dull routines, however. Their dreams are far more interesting.” She made a moue. “I wish I could dream. I’d have such fun. I’d pretend I was alive. That I had a real live boyfriend who worshiped me. But how can I? I’m just a machine.”
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