by Tad Williams
Jeeves led him to the doorway of the lounge before sliding away down the corridor, silent as a cat burglar. Orlando stepped into the snug room and almost knocked over a young woman dressed in a pale frock who was warming herself before the coal fire. It was only as he put out a hand to steady himself that he realized he was still carrying his Coca-Cola.
“Sorry,” he said and balanced the glass on the narrow mantel. “My name is Roland. I’m told you were looking for me.”
She was pretty, as Jeeves had suggested, in a wide-eyed, consumptive sort of way, the darkness of her curly hair and the blush on her cheek only emphasizing the almost translucent pallor of her skin. She returned his stare a little wildly, as though at any moment he might lunge at her—or, worse, laugh at her. “Perhaps I am mistaken,” she said. “I was told … I understood the person I was seeking could be found here. The name Roland was given to me. I’m looking for Orlando Gardiner.” She peered at him as though she might be nearsighted, or as though she were looking for a resemblance in a newly-met, very distant relative, then her face fell. “But you are not him. I have never seen you before.”
He was astonished to hear his real name spoken aloud by a sim, and almost equally surprised to be told he was not himself, but hearing her voice confirmed what he had guessed when he had first seen her. This young woman was another Avialle Jongleur shadow, either one of the original copies of Felix Jongleur’s dead daughter or a variant coined from those copies in the last days of the operating system. The original Avialle had been obsessively in love with the Englishman Paul Jonas, and most of the copies, certainly all those that had been made from the living Avialle after she met Jonas, had continued this infatuation. They had popped up in numerous guises during Jonas’ amnesiac wanderings through the Otherland network, sometimes encouraging him, sometimes actively aiding him, other times brokenly pleading for his love or understanding.
But none of them had ever had much or anything to do with Orlando, and he had no idea why one should be seeking him now, especially under his real name.
“You say you haven’t seen me before.” He gestured for her to sit down—she seemed prepared to bolt like a rabbit at the slightest noise, and he was curious now. “I have to admit, I don’t recognize you either. I do know someone named Orlando Gardiner, however, and I might be able to get a message to him. Can you tell me something of your problem?” The surroundings were beginning to get to him, he realized: he was starting to sound like one of this Wodehouse simworld’s native characters.
“Oh. You … you know him?” She looked a little more hopeful, but it was a miserable sort of hope, as though she had been told that instead of torture she would be given a mercifully swift death. “Where can I find him?”
“You can give me a message. I promise he’ll hear it.”
She brought a hand to her mouth, hesitating. She was very pale, shaking a little, but Orlando could see now that there was a determination behind the doe-eyes that belied her outward appearance. She’s taken some risk to come here, he thought. She must want to get this message to me very badly. “Very well,” she said at last. “My shame could not be any greater. I will trust to your discretion, Mr. Roland. I will trust you to behave like a gentleman.
“Please tell Mr. Gardiner that I need to see him as soon as possible. I am in terrible straits. Terrible. If he does not come to me I do not know what I shall do.” Her reserve suddenly fell apart; tears welled in her eyes. “I am desperate, Mr. Roland!”
“But why?” Orlando hunted vainly for a handkerchief, but she had already produced one of her own from her sleeve and was dabbing at her face. “I’m sorry, Miss … Mrs… . I’m afraid I don’t know your name. Look, I don’t want to make things worse, but I really do have to know why you want to speak with him before I can pass along your message.”
She looked at him, eyes still wet, and seemed to come to a decision. Her lip stopped trembling. “It is not such an unusual story in this wicked world of ours, Mr. Roland. My name is Livia Bard. I am an unmarried woman and I am with child. The child is Mr. Gardiner’s.”
Then, as though they had reached the climax of a particularly good magic trick, the young woman simply vanished into thin air.
####
Find one single woman in only four hundred or so different simworlds, each world with life-size geography, maybe a few million simulated citizens, and no central tracking system? Yeah, problem not. Piece of cake. He couldn’t even amuse himself these days. “Beezle? Any word back on that Amazon place, that Lost World thing with the dinosaurs? What’s it called?”
“Maple White Land, boss. Yeah, we got a confirmed sighting. It seems like another Avialle Jongleur shadow, awright, but she looks different and she’s using a different name—Valda Jackson, something like that. Older, too, if our informant’s right. And she don’t act much like a pregnant lady, either. She leads expeditions into the interior and she drinks like a fish.”
“Fenfen.” He looked around the spacious room, frowning. The river was loudly musical outside and the air smelled of green things, but it wasn’t as soothing as it usually was. He was beginning to find Rivendell less comfortable than it had been, and even though he now permitted Beezle to contact him inside the simulation without having to make an actual appearance, it seemed less and less like the best place for this kind of work. After all, he didn’t want to turn the Last Homely House, the ideal of his childhood, into the permanently busy capitol of Orlando Gardiner Land. Maybe he needed to think about moving his base of operations. “Three months now and this woman might as well have been drezzed right out of the network code for all I can find out about her. Where is she?”
“It’s just a search operation, boss. Like you always say, there ain’t no central registry office. It takes time. But seems to me, time’s one thing you definitely got plenty of.”
“When I want philosophy, I’ll buy a plug-in module. When you get hold of Sam, ask if we can meet somewhere different this time. Her choice.”
“Your wish is my command, O master.”
“It’s really pretty, isn’t it? I always liked Japanese teahouses and stuff.”
Orlando wrinkled his nose. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you use the word ‘pretty’ except when you’re on something like, ‘That’s a pretty stupid idea, Gardiner.’”
Sam Fredericks frowned a little, but her samurai sim turned it into a scowl that might have graced a Noh mask. “What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m turning all girlie or something?”
“No, no.” He was depressed, now. He had only had a few brief visits with Sam since the whole Livia Bard thing had started, and he had missed her, but they still seemed to be out of rhythm with each other. “I just didn’t expect you to pick a place like this for us to meet.”
“You’re always talking about how much you like it.” She looked out from the teahouse. Beyond the open panels of the wall and beyond the tiny, orderly garden of rocks and sand and small trees, the wooden roofs of the city stretched away on all sides. On the far side of the Nihon-Bashi, the stately wooden arch across the Sumida, Edo Castle loomed proudly.
“Well, I like the war part, although that’s mostly over for this cycle—the shogun has pretty much settled in for good. The armor is ho dzang, too.”
“Ho dzang! I haven’t heard anyone say that for a long time.” She saw the look on his face and went on with nervous haste, “Yeah, that armor is great, especially those helmets with the sticking-up things—makes your elves almost look dull. I’m not crazy about the music, though. I always thought it sounded like unhappy cats.”
Orlando clapped his hands and sent away the geisha who had been quietly playing Jiuta on her shamisen. The only singing now was the hoarse chant of a water-seller that drifted up from the street below. “Better?”
“I guess.” She looked at him carefully. “Sorry I’ve been so hard to get hold of. How’s your noble quest?”
“Noble quest? Like the kind we used to have back in the Middle
Country?” He fought off a moment of panic—did she think he hadn’t changed at all? “You mean about the pregnant woman.”
“Yes.” She made herself smile. “And it is a noble quest, Orlando, because you’re a noble quest kind of guy.”
“Except that apparently I impregnated this poor girl and then deserted her. Not really the kind of thing people usually call noble.”
Sam frowned, but this time because she was irritated with his flippancy. “But you didn’t do it. Just because there’s some evil clone version of you running around …”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. There’s never been any other sign of another version of me, not even a hint. Believe me, I’ve had Beezle combing every record since we started up the network again. I’d know.”
“I thought there wasn’t any main archive or whatever.”
“There isn’t, but there’s the informal one that Kunohara started when he and Sellars got the system running again, and most of the individual worlds have their own records that are part of the simulation. For instance, the Wodehouse place where I met this woman started out pretty much like the real early 20th Century London, so there are birth records and death records and telephone directories and everything. The data is a bit hinky sometimes because it’s sort of a comedy world, but there certainly wasn’t any mention of a Livia Bard in any of those.”
“So you she must come from somewhere else, right? She’s one of those travelers, the ones that can cross from one world to another. I can’t remember—were all the Jongleur girl’s shadows like that?”
He shook his head, felt the topknot bob. “I don’t know. They’ve always been the weirdest of all the shadows because the operating system hacked them around so much.” He sat back, toying with his bowl of tea. It was easy to believe his mystery woman could think she was pregnant—many of the Avialle-shadows thought they were pregnant, because the original had been, at least for a little while. Orlando had gone back and forth through Sellars’ history and Kunohara’s margin notes trying to make sense of it, even though he’d heard some of the story from Paul Jonas’ own mouth—it was a bizarre bit of this simiverse’s history and hard to figure out.
“Orlando?”
“Sorry, Sam. I was thinking about something.”
“I just wanted to ask you … are you absolutely sure that … that you didn’t do it?”
“Do what … ? Fenfen, Fredericks, you mean get her pregnant?” He felt his cheeks reddening in a most un-samurai manner.
Sam looked worried. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
He shook his head, although he definitely was embarrassed. He had been a fourteen-year-old invalid when he died, a boy denied a normal childhood or adolescence. Gifted with a life after death, with health and vigor beyond anything he had ever known, not to mention an almost complete lack of adult supervision, he had of course experimented. At first the knowledge that his partners were in some ways no more real than what you could rent on the crudest kind of interactive pornodes hadn’t bothered him, any more than the literal two-dimensionality of women in girlie magazines disturbed earlier generations, but the novelty had warn off fast, leaving him lonely and more than a little disgusted with the whole situation. Also, because he was uncomfortable with their origins, he had made a personal rule never to get involved with any of the Worldwalker Society’s female members, so he found himself more or less unable to date anyone with actual free will.
Of course, love and sex weren’t things he’d ever been very comfortable talking to Sam Fredericks about, anyway. “Let’s just put it this way,” he said at last. “If I had been in a situation where it could have happened, I’d remember. But, Sam, that doesn’t even matter. This isn’t a real person and it’s not a real pregnancy—she’s a construct!”
“Didn’t all those What’s-her-name Jongleur girls have a pregnancy thing, anyway? They all thought they were, or some of them did, or something?”
“Avialle Jongleur. Yes, and like I said, they aren’t real pregnancies. But that’s not the point. The question is, why does this one know my real name and why does she think it’s my baby?”
Sam slowly nodded. “Yeah, that all barks pretty drastically. So what are you going to do?”
“I wish I knew. I’ve been looking for months, but she’s just vanished. Beezle wants me to authorize a bunch of mini-Beezles so we can search the system more effectively—not just for this one woman, but any time we need to. It’s not a bad idea, really, but I’m not sure I want to be the Napoleon of an army of bugs.”
Sam Fredericks set down her tea and sat back. “You seem … I don’t know, a little more cheerful than the last couple of times I saw you.”
He shrugged. “I keep busy. I thought you were the one who was depressed.”
“Scanmaster. I was probably locked off with you for some reason.”
Orlando smiled. “Probably.”
Sam stirred. “I brought you something. Can you import it into the network? It’s on the top level of my system, labeled ‘Orlando.’”
“You brought me something?”
“You don’t think I’d forget your birthday, do you?”
He had half-forgotten, himself. “Actually, it’s tomorrow.” It was strange how little something like a birthday meant when you didn’t go to school and you had hardly any friends—any normal friends, that is.
“I know that, but I won’t see you tomorrow, will I?”
“Seventeen years old. I’m an old man, now.” It wasn’t funny, really—progeria, the disease that had ruined and eventually ended his previous life, was a condition that turned children into doddering ancients and then killed them, mostly before they had even reached their teenage years.
“Old man—hah! You’re younger than me, so six that noise.” A small, gift-wrapped package appeared on the low table. “Good, you found it. Open it.”
He took off the lid and looked at the thing nestled on virtual cotton in the virtual box. “It’s really nice, Sam.”
“Happy birthday, Gardino. Don’t just stare at it—it’s a friendship bracelet, you idiot. You have to read what it says.”
He turned the simple silver bracelet. The inscription said, To Orlando from Sam. Friends Forever. For a moment he didn’t trust his voice. “Thanks.”
“I know there are places you go where you can’t wear it, but I spent a lot of time thinking, like, what can you get someone who can have anything in the whole world—rocket cars, a live pet dinosaur, you name it? All I’ve got to give you that you can’t get in one of these worlds is me. We’re utterly friends, Gardiner, and you remember that. Utterly. No matter what. As long as we both live.”
Orlando was very grateful that this sim was too bushi to cry—the blushing had been bad enough. “Yeah,” he said. “No matter what.” He took a deep breath. “Hey, you want to go for a walk before you have to leave? I’ll show you a little of the Tokaido—that’s kind of the main road. It’s the best place to sightsee. If we’re lucky, a few of the daimyos will still be coming into town. They’re the nobles, and they have to make a pilgrimage here twice a year. Some of them come in with thousands of retainers and soldiers, horses and flags and concubines and all that fen, a big parade. It’s like Samurai Disneyland.”
“You really know this place!”
“I keep busy.”
“You left tonight open, didn’t you?” Beezle asked as Orlando re-animated his Rivendell sim. “Your parents have got plans.”
“Oh, jeez, right, my birthday dinner. That means they’ll want me to wear that tchi seen robot body. Conrad’s probably hooked it up with an air-hose so I can blow out the candles on my cake.” He resented tromping around in that thing so much that he had been avoiding seeing his parents because of it. Still, in just three visits he’d broken a table-leg and several vases, and pulled a door off its hinges by accident. The thing had very delicate hand-responses, but the rest of it was meant for slogging around in mine shafts or in the holds of sunken ships and was about as gracef
ul as an elephant on roller skates. Orlando didn’t want to hurt their feelings, and Conrad was so proud of his idea, but he just hated it.
It’s not as if I didn’t have enough to deal with. Just at the moment, two Society members were stuck in the House simulation in the middle of an armed uprising and unable to escape, there was a programming glitch or something like it causing mutations in the plant life of Bronte World so that Haworth Parsonage was under siege by carnivorous cacti, and he still had no idea of where Livia Bard might be, let alone any explanation for her weird accusation. Yeah, I keep busy.
“Any decision yet on letting me whip up some subagents, boss?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Well, don’t hurt yourself—I hear that thinking stuff ain’t for beginners. You ready to go to your folks? ’Cause you got an urgent message from that Elrond guy you gotta deal with first. He needs you downstairs right now.”
“Jeez, it never stops. Make the connection to that locking toy robot at my parents’, will you? After I finish downstairs I’ll duck into a closet or something and go directly.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to screw up the continuity.” It sounded suspiciously like sarcasm. “Don’t worry, boss. I’m on it. Just go see Elrond.”
He was halfway down the delicate wooden staircase between the small house that he called his home and the central buildings when the thought occurred to him, Why the hell would Beezle be passing messages for Elrond? Rivendell doesn’t work that way.
All questions were answered when he walked into the main hall and discovered his mother, father, and several score elves, dwarves, and assorted other Middle-Earthers waiting for him.