Mount Dragon (51 page)

“Who gives a shit if the horses survive, if we end up dead?”

“Have you tried sucking on a pebble?” Carson asked.

De Vaca flashed him a dark look and spat something small and glistening from her mouth. “I've been sucking all morning. I want a drink. What the hell are these horses good for, anyway? We haven't ridden them in hours.”

Heat and thirst were making her unreasonable. “They'd go lame if we rode in this stuff,” he said, speaking as calmly as he could. “As soon as we get off the lava—”

“Fuck it,” de Vaca said. “I'm taking a drink.” She reached back for the saddlebag.

“Wait,” said Carson. “Wait a moment. When your ancestors crossed this desert, did they break down like that?”

There was a silence.

“Don Alonso and his wife crossed this desert together. And they nearly died of thirst. You told me so.”

De Vaca looked to one side, refusing to answer.

“If they had lost their discipline, you wouldn't be here.”

“Don't try to mind-fuck me,
cabrón
.”

“This is for real, Susana. Our lives depend on keeping these horses alive. Even if we become too weak to walk, we'll still be able to travel if we keep these horses in good condition.”

“OK, OK, you've talked me out of a drink,” she snapped. “I'd rather die of thirst than listen to you preach, anyway.” She pulled savagely on her horse's lead rope. “Get your ass moving,” she muttered.

Carson fell back a moment to examine Roscoe's hooves. There was some chipping around the edges, but otherwise they were holding up. No signs of real danger, like bruising or cracks that ran into the corona. They could go perhaps another mile on the lava.

De Vaca was waiting for him to catch up, glancing at the vultures overhead. “
Zopilotes
. They're already coming to our funeral.”

“No,” said Carson, “they're after something else. We're not that far gone.”

De Vaca was silent for a moment. “I'm sorry I've been giving you a hard time,
cabrón
,” she said at last. “I'm kind of a cranky person, in case you didn't notice.”

“I noticed the first day we met.”

“Back at Mount Dragon, I thought I had a lot to be pissed off about. In my life, in my job. Now, if we can just get out of this furnace without dying, I swear I'll appreciate what I have a little more.”

“Let's not start talking about dying yet. Don't forget, we have more than ourselves to live for.”

“You think I can forget that?” de Vaca said. “I keep thinking about those thousands of innocent people, waiting to receive PurBlood on Friday. I think I'd rather be here, in this heat, than lying on a hospital cot with an IV draining that stuff into my veins.”

She lapsed into silence for a moment.

“In Truchas,” she resumed, “we never had heat like this. And there was water everywhere. Streams came rushing out of the Truchas Peaks, filled with trout. You could get on your hands and knees and drink as much as you wanted. It was always ice cold, even in summer. And so delicious. We used to go skinny-dipping in the waterfalls. God, just thinking about it…” Her voice died away.

“I told you,
don't
think about it,” Carson replied.

There was a silence.

“Maybe our friend is sinking his fangs into the
canalla
as we speak,” de Vaca added hopefully.

Inside the door, Levine halted, frozen.

He was standing on a rocky bluff. Below him, the ocean raged against a granite headland, the waves flinging themselves against the rocks, erupting in white spray before subsiding back into the creamy surf. He turned around. The bluff behind him was bare and windswept. A small, well-used trail wound down through a grassy meadow and disappeared into a thick forest of spruce trees.

There was no sign of the door leading out to the corridor. He had entered a new world entirely.

Levine's hand fell from his laptop for a moment, and he closed his eyes against the view. It was not just the strangeness of the scene that had unnerved him: the huge, incredibly lifelike re-creation of a seacoast where an octagonal office should have been. There was something else.

He
recognized
the place. This was no imaginary landscape. He had been here before, many years ago, with Scopes. In college, when they had been inseparable friends. This was the island where Scopes's family had had a summer place.

Monhegan Island, Maine.

He was standing on a bluff at the seaward end of the island. If he remembered correctly, it was called Burnt Head.

Returning his hand to the laptop, he turned in a slow, deliberate circle, watching the landscape change as he did so. Each new feature, each vista, brought a fresh rush of déjà vu. It was an incredible, almost unbelievable achievement. This was Scopes's personal domain, the heart of his cypherspace program: his secret world, on the island of his boyhood.

Levine recalled the summer he had spent on the island. For a kid from working-class Boston, the place had been a revelation. They'd spent the long warm days exploring tidal pools and sunlit fields. Brent's family had a rambling Victorian house, set by itself on a bluff at the edge of the Village, toward the lee side of the island.

That, Levine suddenly realized, was where he would find Scopes.

He started down the trail, into the dark spruce forest. Levine noticed that the strange singing of the cyberspace world outside was gone, replaced by the island noises he remembered: the occasional cry of a gull, the distant sound of the ocean. As he moved deeper into the forest, the sound of the ocean disappeared, leaving only the wind sighing and moaning through the craggy branches of the spruce trees. Levine walked on as a light fog rolled in, amazed at how easily he was adjusting to moving around within this virtual world. The huge image before him on the elevator wall; the sounds and sights; the responsiveness of the program to his computer's commands; all worked together toward a total suspension of disbelief.

The trail forked. Levine concentrated, trying to remember the way to the Village. In the end, he chose one fork at random.

The trail dipped down into a hollow and crossed a narrow brook, a blue thread bordered by pitcher plants and skunk cabbage. He crossed the stream, following the trail up a narrow ravine and deeper into the woods. Gradually, the trail petered out into nothingness. Levine turned around and began to retrace his steps, but the fog had grown thick, and all he could see were the black, lichen-covered trunks that surrounded him on all sides, marching into the mist. He was lost.

Levine thought for a moment. The Village, he knew, lay on the western side of the island. But which way was west?

He became aware of a shadow moving through the fog to his left; within moments, the shadow resolved itself into the shape of a man, holding a lantern at his side. As the man walked, the lantern made a yellow ring of light that bobbed and winked in the fog. Suddenly, the man stopped. He turned slowly, looking toward Levine through a defile of dark tree trunks. Levine looked back, wondering if he should type a greeting. There was a flash of light and a popping sound.

Levine realized he was being shot at. The figure in the fog was apparently some kind of security construct inside the cypherspace program. But how much could it see, and why was it firing at him?

Suddenly, a voice cut in, loud and insistent, over the soft sighing of the wind. Levine turned quickly, staring at the elevator speakers. The voice belonged to Brent Scopes.

“Attention, all security personnel. An intruder has been discovered in the GeneDyne computer. Under current network conditions, that means the intruder is also in the building. Locate and detain immediately.”

By entering the island world, he had alerted the GeneDyne supercomputer's security program. But what would happen if he was hit with gunfire? Perhaps it would terminate the Cypherspace program, leaving him as far from Scopes as when he had first entered the building.

The dark figure fired again.

Levine fled backward into the woods. As he navigated through the swirling fingers of fog, he began to see more dark figures moving through the trees, and more flashes of light. The trees began to thin, and he came out at last onto a dirt road.

He stopped for a moment and looked around. The figures seemed to have vanished. Immediately, he started down the dirt road, moving as fast as his laptop controls would permit, alert for signs of anyone approaching.

A sudden noise alerted him, and he ducked back into the woods. Within moments, a group of shadowy figures glided by, moving eastward like ghosts, holding lanterns and carrying guns. He waited until they passed, then returned to the road.

Soon, the road turned to stone and began to descend toward the sea. In the distance, Levine could now make out the scattered rooftops of the Village, crowded around the white spire of the church. Behind them rose the great mansard roof of the Island Inn.

Cautiously, he descended the hill and entered the town. The place appeared deserted. The fog was thicker between the weather-beaten houses, and he moved quickly past dark windows of old, rippled glass. Here and there a light in one of the houses cast a glow through the fog. Once he heard voices and managed to maneuver himself into an alley until a group of figures had moved past him in the fog.

Past the church, the road forked again. Now Levine knew where he was. Choosing the left fork, he followed the road as it climbed the side of a bluff. Then he stopped, maneuvering the trackball for a view up the hill.

There, at the top of the bluff, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, rose the gloomy outlines of the Scopes mansion.

The long hours of stooping and searching the lava for sign had taken their toll on Nye's back. The horses had left barely enough marks to follow, and it was tedious, slow work. In three hours he had managed to track Carson and de Vaca less than two miles.

He straightened up, massaging his back, and took another small drink from the water bag. He poured a few quarts into his hat and let Muerto slurp it down. He would catch up to them eventually, if only to find their dead bodies being pulled apart by coyotes. He would outlast them.

He closed his eyes for a moment against the blazing white light of the sun. Then, with a deep sigh, he began again. There, two feet ahead, was a crushed clump of grass. He took one step and looked beyond it. There, maybe four feet ahead, was an overturned stone, showing a little sand on its bottom. He scanned a semicircle with his eyes. And there was the impression of the side of a hoof in a tiny patch of sand.

It was bloody tedious, to tell the truth. He occupied himself with the thought that, by now, Carson and de Vaca had no doubt drunk all their water. Their horses were probably half-crazed with thirst.

Here, at last, was a clear stretch of tracks, leading ahead for at least twenty feet. Nye straightened up and walked alongside them, grateful for the temporary respite. Maybe they'd grown tired of making their trail so difficult. He knew he bloody well had.

There was a sudden movement in the corner of his eye, and simultaneously Muerto reared, jerking Nye backward into the horse's flailing hooves. There was a stunning blow to his head, followed by a strange noise that quickly died away, and an infinity of time passed. Then he found himself looking up at an endless field of blue. He sat up, feeling a wave of nausea. Muerto was twenty feet away, grazing peacefully. Automatically, his hand reached for his head. Blood. He looked at his watch, realized he'd only been unconscious for a minute or two.

He turned suddenly. Off to one side, a boy sat on a small rock, grinning, his knees sticking up under his chin. Wearing shorts, knee socks, and a battered blue blazer, the breast-pocket emblem of the St. Pancras' School for Boys half-obscured by dirt. His longish hair was matted, as if it had been wet for a very long time, and it stuck out from the sides of his head.

“You,” Nye breathed.

“Rattler-snake,” the boy replied, nodding toward a clump of yucca.