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by McClelland, Mark

  "Do you want me to remain as a blue jay?" asked Scorpio.

  "Yes, to be safe. I'll tell you when it's okay to switch."

  Wait, if Scorpio can teleport, why am I wasting time flying around?

  "Teleport to the Village," instructed Raymond. "I'll be right behind. Find me and stay close."

  Raymond pulled his airboard to a stop and took a look at the globe. He found the dot labeled "the Village" and said, "I want to go there". It worked. He was immediately transported to a spot straight over the Village, as he had been before. Except this time he was higher up, at an elevation that matched how high he was when he told the globe to teleport him. He flew down and through the woods, and landed just outside the clinic.

  "Bailey?" he called in through the open windows.

  He opened the front door and stepped inside, into what appeared to be a cross between a lounge and an exam room. As he was setting down the globe and airboard, a swinging door at the opposite end of the room opened, and Bailey stepped through carrying a squirming animal in her arms. It was long and slender and furry and moved like a weasel or otter, its head popping out of every which way. Bailey couldn't help but laugh as she struggled to hang onto it.

  "Do you remember Carly?" asked Bailey. She walked toward Raymond, and the animal's energy level surged even higher.

  "No, is this Carly?" asked Raymond. He also couldn't help but smile, too. The animal had pale brownish fur over most of her body, with black mask-like markings around her eyes. She finally broke free of Bailey and leapt straight at Raymond, clearly expecting him to catch her, which he did.

  "Well she clearly remembers you!" laughed Bailey. "Oh my god, she's so excited!"

  Carly climbed onto Raymond's shoulder, circled around behind his head, put her front paws on his other shoulder, and sniffed his ear. He giggled and at the same time called out in a mildly scolding tone, "Carly! What are you doing!" She circled his neck again, then stood with her hind legs on his shoulder and her front paws on his head and paused, sniffing his hair.

  "Is she a mongoose or something?" asked Raymond.

  "Sort of. She's a modified meerkat, altered to be better suited as a domestic animal."

  "A-life?" asked Raymond.

  "Yes. I've been taking care of her while you were away, but she clearly prefers you. I made a point to feed her so she wouldn't be too much of a pest at dinner. I'm assuming you're here for dinner?"

  "Yeah, I think dinner would be great. And then maybe I'll turn in early. Where did I sleep? Do I have a tree house?"

  "You do. Actually, you slept in three different places. There's your main tree house, where I still find Carly sleeping sometimes. And there's the small one in the treetops, where you liked to watch the slammers. But you also slept at Salya's tree house pretty often. Let's eat and then I'll show you your options. I'll grab your stuff so you can give Carly the attention she's clearly dying for."

  Carly wrapped herself around the back of Raymond's neck, her paws stretched along his right shoulder, and settled in. Her fur was kind of itchy on his skin, and he quickly discovered how hot it can be to wear a meerkat stole in the tropics. As he and Bailey walked together through the old forest to her place, Raymond scanned the area looking for Scorpio. He noticed a flash of blue and signaled with his hands, "I see you."

  "That thing isn't going to eat me, is it?" came Scorpio's voice in his ear.

  "Say, Bailey," said Raymond. "What does Carly eat?"

  "Insects, mostly," said Bailey. "And sometimes lizards."

  "She ever eat birds?"

  "No. Insects are so plentiful, she usually doesn't need anything else. Meerkats do eat birds sometimes, but it's rare."

  Raymond thought about boiling this down to a simple "no" for Scorpio, but decided to signal "I don't know" instead, to be safe.

  Eddie came staggering out from behind a tree, tugging at a snake coiled around his neck and wailing dramatically, "Get it off me! Get it off me!"

  Raymond stopped short, worried that Carly and the snake might be inclined to tangle.

  "Ha ha," mocked Bailey. "That's Fiona, Eddie's pet snake."

  Eddie immediately stopped his antics. The snake, remarkably unperturbed by the whole thing, flicked its tongue out in Raymond's general direction, giving him further concern about Carly's wellbeing. He tapped Bailey on the shoulder.

  "You said I wasn't far off when I guessed that Carly was a mongoose. How do meerkats and snakes feel about each other?"

  "These two know each other," said Bailey. "Normally, a meerkat would be terrified of a snake, and rightly so. I don't think meerkats attack snakes the way mongoose do. Fiona's well fed, and I've never seen her show any real interest in Carly. I wouldn't worry. Carly's smart enough to keep her distance."

  "What you guys up to?" asked Eddie.

  "We're headed to my place for dinner," replied Bailey.

  "Can I come?"

  Bailey looked to Raymond.

  "Uh, sure..." said Raymond. "Why not?"

  Maybe I'll learn something.

  "Alright!" cried out Eddie, and he did a funny little dance, skipping in circles and flinging his arms this way and that.

  o-------------------------------o

  Bailey's tree house was spacious and closer to the ground than most, reached via a spiral staircase that wrapped around the trunk of the tree. It had the same rustic feel the other tree houses had—thatched roof, rough-hewn exterior, open windows, and the quirks and inconsistencies of a hand-built structure. Raymond found himself at ease in the space, despite its being unlike any place he had known before uploading. The furnishings were simple, made of branches lashed together with hundreds of little knots. Baskets and pots sat on shelves around the room.

  "What's for dinner?" asked Eddie. "Can I have pizza?"

  "Sure," said Bailey. "How about you, Raymond?"

  "Oh, whatever."

  "You always liked my acorn squash soup, with toasted mustard seeds and cumin. How about that, some chicken satay with peanut sauce, and a lemony white wine?"

  "Wow. Okay—that sounds great."

  Raymond found his mouth watering at this description of food, and realized he had hardly eaten anything.

  "Are you hungry?" asked Eddie. "I am!"

  "Yeah," replied Raymond. "Actually, I am hungry."

  Bailey set a tray of drinks and hot appetizers on the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room.

  "Eddie," said Bailey, "how about if you put Fiona out on the deck."

  Eddie headed out through an open door.

  "Here you go," said Bailey, handing Raymond a glass of white wine. She held her own glass out to toast. "It's great to see you again," she said, and they clinked glasses.

  Raymond sipped the wine and was surprised to find that it really did taste lemony. He ate appetizers while Bailey set about cooking, magically producing all the ingredients she needed from the few cupboards she had in her small kitchen. Carly climbed onto the bar, stood on her hind legs and sniffed the air, then darted off to explore.

  "So you and Salya spent time in Faralonia?" asked Raymond.

  "Yes."

  "What was that like?"

  "Man!" interrupted Eddie. "That snake didn't want to get off me." He hopped into the seat next to Raymond, claimed his glass of bright pink juice from the tray, and started eating appetizers.

  "Faralonia was beautiful," said Bailey. "And there were a lot more people there."

  Eddie snatched the globe up and started looking at it. "Where's Faralonia?"

  "You won't find it," said Raymond. "It's gone. It was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Lidral."

  "Oh my god!" exclaimed Bailey. "Gone?"

  "Did you destroy it?" asked Eddie, looking at Raymond curiously.

  "I guess you could say that."

  "Did the animals die?" asked Bailey.

  "No," said Raymond. "They... got away. Before the volcano erupted. They knew it was going to erupt."

  "What about the people?" asked Eddi
e. "Did you kill all the people?"

  "No, the people were already gone. Except for Tomas, who was still there to take care of the animals, and he left when they left. But the others... I must have sent them away when I no longer felt they were... necessary."

  "Where did the animals go?" asked Eddie.

  "I actually don't know, Eddie. I don't have god power anymore."

  "How do you know they didn't die then?"

  "Because I think I programmed them to leave before they got hurt, and I wouldn't have done that just to kill them. Or maybe they did die, because there's no other computer for them to go to. Tell me, Bailey—is Eddie always like this?"

  Bailey stirred the pot of soup. "He's always asking questions," she replied without looking up.

  "Why did you destroy Faralonia?" asked Eddie.

  "That's a good question. I don't know."

  "Are you going to destroy the Village, too?"

  "I think so. If you look at the globe, you'll see areas of brown spreading westward as the meteorites start fires. Eventually, I expect a comet will come and destroy everything." He took a sip of his wine.

  "Will we all die?" asked Eddie, the tone of his voice still showing nothing more than curiosity.

  "I expect so," said Raymond.

  Bailey stopped what she was doing and looked up. "Why?" she asked. "Did we disappoint you?"

  Raymond sipped his wine again, pondering this question as the others looked at him. He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. Since I created you, it's not really a question of whether you disappointed me." He looked closely at Eddie, watching for a reaction that would reveal deeper understanding than a persona could ever have. "It's more a question of whether I disappointed myself, isn't it."

  "Disappointed yourself?" asked Eddie.

  "Yeah, maybe I was disappointed because I couldn't create a world I was happy with. Or maybe I destroyed it because I didn't want someone else to get hold of it. You tell me, Eddie."

  "Me?" said Eddie, his eyes opening wide. "I don't know!" He threw his arms up and cocked his head off to one side, cutely innocent in his ignorance.

  "Should we be doing something different?" asked Bailey. "Maybe we could do something so you're not disappointed?"

  "I don't know," said Raymond. "I would stop it if I could, but at this point there's nothing I can do."

  "Do we need to help Carly and Fiona and all the other animals get away before the Village is destroyed?" asked Bailey.

  "No, they'll just disappear, and go live somewhere else, I guess."

  "And there's nothing we should do differently?" asked Bailey.

  "Not that I can think of," said Raymond. "Enjoy yourselves, take care of the animals. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and the comet won't come."

  "Is there really nothing you can do?" asked Eddie.

  "I don't think so." Raymond turned and looked Eddie straight in the eye. "Tell me something. If you could help me stop the comet, would you?"

  "Of course."

  Yeah, I bet you would.

  Bailey served dinner on the deck. As Raymond wandered out that way, he saw Carly curled up in a chair in the living room. Outside, he looked for Fiona, and saw that she was wound around a tree limb, not far from the deck. He looked for Scorpio briefly, but didn't see him.

  "What're you lookin' for?" asked Eddie.

  "Just checking things out."

  Raymond signaled to Scorpio, asking for confirmation that he was nearby, and felt his head nod.

  Bailey topped off everyone's drinks, and they settled in to eat. The soup was fragrant and delicious, and went very well with the chicken and wine.

  "Were you around," asked Raymond of Bailey, "when I came back to get Salya from Faralonia?"

  "No, I was already back in the Village when that happened."

  "But you know what I'm talking about?" asked Raymond.

  "Yes. You told me about it once, when you visited the Village."

  "Tell me what you know."

  "I asked how she was doing, and you said, 'You don't want to know'. You said Anya was sleeping with another man, and it made you angry, so you took it out on Salya. You said, 'I took her to Iniquita and had her punished—had her treated like the whore she really is'. When I asked what you meant, and whether she was okay, you said she was 'okay enough', and that I shouldn't ask you any more questions about her. You said she was just a persona like me, so what did it fucking matter."

  Raymond nodded. So Anya ended up with another man? Anger flared within him, and he could imagine how the original Raymond must have felt. He wanted to ask who it was, but thought better of it—he might not like the answer. It was probably someone she had been interested in even when they were together. And without her, what connection did he have to the real world? She was his sustaining force, and her betrayal would have felt like death.

  Would have felt like death. Maybe that's what the mausoleum was about. Maybe she's not dead.

  "Why did I visit the Village?" asked Raymond.

  "You said you had to get away, that in creating Iniquita you realized how black your soul was, and that it was eating you from the inside out. But the next day you were gone, and I didn't see you again until today."

  Raymond noticed that Eddie had stopped eating his pizza, and was staring at Raymond.

  "What do you think of all this, Eddie?"

  "Raymond," chided Bailey, "he's just a boy."

  "Come on, Eddie," said Raymond, undeterred. "I want to know what you think of this?"

  "It sounds like you're a bad man," said Eddie.

  "It does, doesn't it. A lonely, angry killer."

  Raymond wanted desperately to confront him, and ask whether he was fgonsalez. But he was afraid to. He was afraid they would give him even less freedom if he revealed that he knew he was being watched. They might even pull the plug on him. The boy went back to eating his pizza. Raymond looked at him, wondering whether there was a real person behind this avatar. There was no way to know for sure, without god power, but instinct told him 'yes'.

  o-------------------------------o

  The rest of dinner was eaten in silence. Afterward, Eddie collected his snake and left, and Bailey took Raymond on the tour of his sleeping options, as promised. Carly came along, returning to her spot on Raymond's shoulders. They started with Salya's tree house, which was as it had been left when Raymond's god copy took Salya and Bailey to Faralonia. It was smaller than Bailey's and a bit higher up, accessed via any of three methods: a knotted rope, a hand-operated pulley-lift, or a zip-line from a distant tree house, which Bailey said was Raymond's. As with Bailey's tree house, the interior of this one was decorated with baskets and pottery, but Salya's were more colorful, with lots of reds, oranges, and yellows. Aside from these decorations, there were few personal items. Raymond went through cupboards and drawers looking for anything interesting, but came up with nothing. He rifled through the dresser, tossing all manner of women's clothing aside as he did so. He went through the closet, looked under the pillows, checked under the mattress. Nothing.

  "Are you looking for anything in particular?" asked Bailey helpfully.

  "No," said Raymond. "Anything interesting, I guess. But I won't know it until I see it."

  A robotic monkey similar to Passe-Partout swung down from its perch near the ceiling and went about returning everything to its proper place.

  "What's next?" asked Raymond.

  Bailey took him to his own tree house. It was even smaller than Salya's, and more spare. There was a small sitting room with an adjoining deck on the bottom floor, and a ladder up to a sleeping loft, which Carly promptly claimed as her place to sleep for the night. From the deck there was a ladder up to the roof, where there was a yoga space and a hammock. Raymond thought back to the maze of palatial rooms Venetia had shown him, and he felt like this was his god copy's response to the self-indulgence of that first home.

  And from here the self-indulgences increased—first Faralonia, then Iniquita.

  He s
nooped around as he had at Salya's, but there was even less to explore here. Again he found nothing of interest.

  "We'll need an airboard to get to the third one," said Bailey.

  They returned through the darkness to the clinic, where Raymond had left his airboard, and both climbed on. Bailey held onto him from behind, and guided him up through the tree limbs, slowly, both of them ducking at times to avoid branches Raymond couldn't see until they were just a few feet away. Feeling her arm around him, Raymond noticed for the first time that she was a woman, and he a man, and felt some degree of attraction to her.

  The treetop house turned out to be nothing more than a single glass-enclosed circular room with a surrounding deck. Inside were a couple of chairs, a mattress on a wooden platform, and another airboard, leaned up against the glass. The air at this height smelled of sulfur, and ash flakes floated down from the clouds above.

  "I love it up here," said Bailey, as if unaware of the ash. "I came up here once with you and Salya, during slammer season, and we all watched the storms for hours, until we all fell asleep."

  Raymond realized that if he asked her to, she would probably sleep with him now. Or would she? Her persona was complex enough that Raymond couldn't be sure. She would probably share a bed with him, to be close, but he wondered whether she would have sex with him. Not that he wanted her to—it was idle curiosity. She was clearly the parallel to Suma, as Salya was Anya's parallel, and he scolded himself for even thinking such a thing. But he couldn't help it.

  "I think I like Carly's choice," said Raymond. "This is cool, but it feels disconnected. How about if I drop you off at your place, and then I'll sleep at my old place."

  They returned to Bailey's. He wished her a good night, and was about to leave when she interrupted him.

  "Don't you want your globe?"

  "Right! Wow, I can't believe I almost forgot it."

  She fetched it for him, and he flew to his god copy's tree house. He brought the globe and airboard inside, climbed up to the sleeping loft, and situated himself next to Carly.

  "I can see why you like sleeping here," he said to the sleeping meerkat. "Cozy spot."

  It was so cozy, he was tempted to let himself drift off to sleep. But this was his time to switch avatars. If he was right, whoever was watching him would continue to watch his avatar, allowing him to occupy Venetia and have a good talk with Scorpio.