NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 7.0 (Eu, NAm)—"Escape!"

(visual: Zelmo on ledge)

VO: Nedra (Kamchatka T) and Zelmo (Cold Wells Carlson) are on the run from Iron Island Academy, but agents of Lord Lubar (Ignatz Reiner) shoot Zelmo with a Despair Ray, and now he is desperate to kill himself. This is last episode before "Escape!" folds into the "I Hate My Life" plotline. 5 supporting, 25 background open, cold-weather outdoor shoot. Flak to: GCN.IHMLIFE.CAST

For the third time they poled the raft across the sluggish current, steering toward the far shore. The bank seemed little more than a long stone's throw away, but after strenuous exercise by Sam and the new arrival Azador on one side, !Xabbu and Jongleur on the other, they had moved no closer.

At last they dragged the poles out and stood up straight to catch their breath. Released now to the current, the raft began to drift lazily downstream. The meadowlands on the far bank, so unexceptional, so apparently identical to the side of the river from which they had come, were beginning to seem like some mythical continent out of the past.

"Someone must swim," Jongleur said. "A person may be allowed where a boat is not."

Sam was nettled. The old man might have been proved right in his conjecture that crossing the river, not following it, was the key to traversing this strange land, but she still didn't like the assumption of command in his voice.

"We don't work for you," she said through clenched teeth. Something bumped her in the small of the back and she whirled, ready to shout at Jongleur, but it was !Xabbu who had nudged her. He gave her a significant look; it took Sam a moment to figure it out.

We're not supposed to talk about who Jongleur is, she remembered, and felt ashamed. All those years as a thief, creeping through the houses of the rich and powerful in the Middle Country—the imaginary rich and powerful anyway—and here she was, when it really counted, almost blurting out secrets for no reason. She lowered her eyes.

"He is right," Azador said. "We will not know for certain until someone tries to swim. I would do it, but with my leg. . . ." He made a gesture of regret, of heroism postponed.

Sam waited for !Xabbu to volunteer and was surprised when he did not. Usually the small man insisted on taking the primary risks before he would let anyone else, especially Sam, do something dangerous. "I guess it's me, then," she said. So all those years of morning swim practice would get some practical use. She hoped she'd get to tell her mom about it someday. The thought of something so gloriously mundane as laughing with her mother about swimming those hated laps sent a sharp spike of longing through her.

"Wait, I am not sure. . . ." !Xabbu began.

"It's okay, I'm good at this." Without giving herself more time to worry, she lifted her arms and leaped from the edge of the raft. When she surfaced she could hear Azador and Jongleur cursing at the violent rocking caused by her dive.

The water was a bit of a shock, colder than she expected, and though the current was slow, it was a steady drag that made swimming a great deal more difficult than it had been in the pool back home; still, after a few awkward kicks she got her body level and began to cut an angular path across the river, heading for the grassy, welcoming slope of the far bank.

A couple of minutes, she guessed, gauging the distance.

Within half a hundred strokes it became obvious that either the current was deceptively strong or she was suffering the same fate as the raft. She lifted her head above water and changed to a breast stroke so she could better see what was happening. She dug river water out from before her, surged against the resistance, made headway . . . but the land got no closer. Frustrated, she dove under the surface, forcing her way down until one of her hands brushed against the thick grasses waving at the bottom of the river before flattening out again. She kicked as hard as she could, wriggling her body like a fish. She was proud of her strength: she would not give up without testing herself and the simulation.

When she couldn't hold her breath any longer, she gave another two kicks, then allowed herself to glide upward. The shore was still just as far away. Disgusted, treading water, she had turned around toward the middle of the river to look for the raft when a sudden, shocking pain stabbed at her leg.

Something grabbed me. . . ! was all she had time to think before she slid under the water. She fought her way back up through agony, one leg helpless, and realized it was not some carnivorous river dweller that had struck but a cramp in her calf. It made little difference: she could not keep herself above water for more than a moment, and she was exhausted from her fruitless swim.

Sam shouted for !Xabbu, but her nose and mouth were full of water and it came out as little more than a gurgle. She simply could not kick the cramped leg. nor could she do much else. She tried to roll over on her back and go limp—the words dead man's float bubbled through her brain, a very unreassuring phrase—now the pain in her leg was excruciating and river water was rolling across her face. She had just sunk under the surface for the second time when something whacked hard against her shoulder. She grabbed at the barge pole, clutching it as though it were the shepherd's crook of her very own guardian angel. Which, in a way, it was.

"I was very frightened, Sam." !Xabbu had been unwilling to leave her side to make the fire, and had left the job to Azador. As she huddled beside the low blaze, still shivering a half hour later, she found herself actually grateful to the mustached man. "I was hoping, hoping very hard, that we could get the raft as far as you swam," !Xabbu went on. "Oh, I was frightened."

Sam was touched. In some ways, her experience seemed to have been worse for him than it had been for her. "I'm okay. You saved me."

!Xabbu only shook his head.

"So we are thwarted," said Jongleur. "We cannot cross the river, either by boat or by swimming."

Sam made an effort to stop her teeth from chattering. "But there must be a bridge. Those little animals or whatever they were—the Bubble Bunny ones—they said something about going to a bridge. We just never found out what they meant." She could not help glaring at Jongleur, since it had been his frightening temper that had driven the natives away. She thought she saw a shadow of guilt cross his face.

Maybe he's a little bit human, she decided. Just a little. Of course, it might only be regret at having interfered with his own chances.

"But there are no bridges," Azador declared. "I have gone all the way around this bloody river three times. You have gone around it once yourself. Did you see bridges?"

"It's not that simple," Sam said stubbornly. "We can see the other side of the river, but that doesn't mean we can get there. So if we can see things we can't reach, why shouldn't there be things that we can't see but we can reach?" She had to stop and say it over again in her head to see if it made sense. She decided it did, more or less.

"We can do nothing more today." !Xabbu's troubled expression had not gone, but it had changed into something different, more remote. "We will think again in the morning." He reached out and touched Sam's arm. "I am happy you were not hurt, Sam."

"Just my leg, and that's better now." She smiled, hoping to cheer him a little, but wondered how convincing it was with her teeth still chattering.

For all !Xabbu's concern, he was not beside her when Sam woke sometime in the middle of the night. She could see the shadowy forms of the other two revealed by the dying coals, but no sign of the small man.

Call of nature, like, she guessed, and had almost toppled back into sleep when she remembered that there was no longer such a thing for any of them. She jerked upright. The idea of losing him, of being left alone with only Jongleur and Azador, was too horrible to consider.

I don't want any of this. I just want to go home.

She tried to calm herself, forcing herself to imagine what Renie or Orlando would do. If !Xabbu was gone she had to go and look for him, that was all. She considered rousing the others but decided against it. If she could not find any sign of him within a hundred meters or so of the campfire she would think about it again.

She was just pulling a smoldering stick out of the fire to use as a torch when she noticed that someone else had already had the same idea: a hundred meters from the camp a single spot of orange light stood out against the black velvet hills. Sam trotted toward it.

The end of !Xabbu's torch had been spiked into the soft loam of a grassy hillside; he was sitting beside it. He did not look up at her approach, and she was just beginning to feel frightened again when he shook himself out of his reverie and turned to her.

"Is everything all right, Sam?"

"Yeah, chizz. I just woke up and . . . I was worried because you were gone."

He nodded. "I am sorry. I thought you were too deeply asleep to notice." He turned back to the sky. "The stars are very strange here. There is a pattern, but I cannot hold it in my mind."

She seated herself beside him. The grass was damp, but after the mishap in the river she scarcely noticed.

"Will you not be cold?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

They sat for a while in silence, Sam fighting an urge to drive the fear away with friendly noise. At last !Xabbu cleared his throat, a sound so uncharacteristic in its uncertainty that Sam felt her skin goose pimple.

"I . . . I did a terrible wrong to you today," he said.

"You saved me."

"I let you go into the river. It should have been me, but I was afraid."

"Why should it have been you? You're as bad as Renie—you think you should do all the dangerous things before anyone else."

"The fact is that I feared the water. I was almost killed once in the river where I grew up, when I was a child. A crocodile."

"That's terrible!"

He shrugged. "That does not mean I should have let you do what I could not."

Sam hissed with exasperation. "You don't have to do everything," she said. "That's uttermost fenfen."

"But. . . ."

"Listen." She leaned toward him, forcing him to look at her. "You've saved my life a dozen times already. Remember the mountain? Remember how you got us off that disappearing trail? You've done more than your share, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't, like, do our part." She raised her hand to keep him from speaking. "Orlando got killed helping us—saving me. How could I live with myself if I wasn't taking risks, too? If I just sat back like some . . . some princess-girl in an old story, and let everyone rescue me? I don't know how things are in the Okey-dongo Delta or whatever it is, but where I come from, that scans for days and days."

!Xabbu smiled, but there was pain in it. "Renie says it is 'old-fashioned bullshit.' "

"And she'll say it again when we find her if you don't straighten up." Now Sam was the one to smile. She prayed it would be true, against all the odds. Renie and !Xabbu deserved each other in every way. So much love, so much stubbornness. She hoped they would have the rest of their lives to argue over which of them should do the harder jobs. "Is that why you came out here? Because you felt bad you didn't go into the river and I did, and I got a cramp?"

He shook his head. "Not only that. Something is troubling me, but I do not know what it is. Sometimes I need quiet to think." He smiled again. "Sometimes I need more than that. I thought I might dance."

"Dance?" If he had suggested he was considering building a rocket ship she could not have been more surprised.

"For me it is . . . like praying. Sometimes." He flicked his fingers, troubled by the inadequacy of his words. "But I am not ready. I do not feel it."

Sam didn't know what to say. After a moment, she stood. "Do you want to be alone? Or should we go back to camp?"

!Xabbu plucked his torch from the ground and rose lithely onto his feet. "I am troubled by something else," he said. "It is not enough simply to be silent about Jongleur's true story in front of Azador."

Sam felt her face warm with embarrassment. "I'm sorry—that was so stupid today."

"It is hard—unnatural—to think of such things all the time. But I think we must make it clear to Jongleur that Azador has a hatred of the Grail Brotherhood. Then I think he must keep himself quiet, if only to protect himself."

"It's so strange," Sam said as they walked back toward the remains of the campfire. "Nothing here is real, you can't trust anything. Well, almost anything." She bumped !Xabbu, a gentle nudge of comradeship. "It's all like some kind of . . . I don't know. Like a carnival. Like a masquerade."

"But a terrible one," he said. "Dangerous and terrible." They reached the campfire, and the sleeping forms of their two companions, without saying anything more.

The next day was spent in what Sam felt was a clearly hopeless search for a way to cross the river. They clambered through the reed beds alongside the river, hoping to find some clue to how others had crossed—footprints, the remains of a bridge or dock—but without success. Sam was depressed, !Xabbu reserved and thoughtful. Jongleur, as usual, spoke little, lost in his private thoughts. Only Azador seemed unbowed. In fact, he talked for much of the day, chattering compulsively about his adventures in the network, his discoveries of how things worked, of secret shortcuts within simworlds and well-hidden gateways to get out of them. Some of it was clearly bragging, but Sam could not help being impressed by the depth of his knowledge. How long had this man wandered the Grail Network?

"Where do you come from?" she asked him as they sloshed through a shallow backwater. A group of promising stones were proving to be only the cracked remains of a larger rocky shelf. "I mean, before you were here?"

"I . . . I do not wish to talk about it," he said. He scowled, poking at the silt between his feet with a length of reed. "But I have made the best use of my time here that anyone could. I have learned things the builders of this place thought would remain forever hidden. . . ."

Sam did not want to hear another recitation of his accomplishments. "Yeah, but you can't find a way across the river, so at the moment the rest of it doesn't count for much."

Azador looked hurt. Sam felt bad—unlike Jongleur, he had done nothing to harm her or her friends—so she tried to think of something else to talk about.

"But I suppose that you did a pretty good job on that raft after all." Although it had been !Xabbu's deft repairs that had made it riverworthy, she knew but did not mention. "It's not your fault that the system won't let us cross that way."

He looked a little mollified.

"Are you really a Gypsy?" she asked.

His reaction was sudden and fierce. "Who told you such a foul thing?"

It was all Sam could do not to look at !Xabbu, who was holding quiet conversation with Jongleur thirty paces away across the muddy shallows. "Nobody . . . I . . . I just thought you said you were." She was furious with herself. "Maybe I just thought it because . . . because of that mustache."

He stroked the article in question as though it were an affronted animal he was soothing. "Gypsies, they are sneaks and thieves. Azador is an explorer. Do not misunderstand when I tell you of my adventures. I am a prisoner. I have the right to discover all I can, to take what I can from my captors."

"I'm sorry. I just misunderstood."

"You should be more careful." He gave her a hard stare. "This is a place where you must be cautious what you say to strangers."

Sam silently, emphatically agreed.

Another hour of fruitless investigation passed before she had a chance to talk to !Xabbu out of earshot of the others. He had joined her to scavenge in one last clump of reeds. Azador and Jongleur had given up, and were sitting on one of the meadowy hillocks, watching them.

"I'm such a scanbox," she said when she had explained what happened. "I should keep my mouth shut."

!Xabbu looked troubled. "Perhaps you blame yourself too much, as I did last night. Perhaps we have learned something, although I cannot say what. For one thing, it is very strange that he should say this now. Almost the only thing he would tell us before was that he was a Gypsy—Romany, as he called himself. He seemed very proud of it." The small man pulled aside a curtain of swaying cattails to reveal that what had looked from a distance like the remains of a wooden structure was only a tangle of tree trunks uprooted and piled by some storm. "Perhaps he is not the only one who has decided to keep his past a secret."

"I don't know. He didn't seem scared or nervous, like I would if someone knew something about me they shouldn't. He just seemed . . . angry." She looked to the hillside. Jongleur and Azador were talking, or seemed to be. It made her feel uneasy. "Look at that old monster just sitting there. It's his fault we can't find anyone to ask how to cross the river!" Whether it really was Jongleur's fault or not, they had seen no other inhabitants of the simworld since the old man had frightened Jecky Nibble and his charges away from their campfire.

"It is possible. But it may be they have all simply crossed over to someplace that is safer."

"Maybe." Sam frowned. "What could those two be saying to each other?"

!Xabbu looked up. "I do not know. I told the old man that Azador might become violent it he found out who Jongleur truly is. So I do not think he is telling him anything about that."

By the time they had climbed out of the mud and started up the grassy hillside, Azador had risen and walked away from Jongleur. He stood on the hilltop, facing away from them. As they neared the crest, he suddenly turned and shouted, "Come, come here! Look at this!"

Sam and !Xabbu hurried up the last few meters.

"Look," said Azador. "Can you see?"

"Oh, no!" Sam felt chilled. "They're fading out."

The distant hills were only ghostly outlines now, streaks of sunlit reflection, milky, misty indicators of where solid hills should stand. Even parts of the meadowed plain seemed to have turned transparent as glass. Sam looked around in panic, but the river and its banks were still solid behind them, the hillock beneath their feet still reassuringly lifelike.

"They are disappearing," Azador said. For the first time. she heard something like real fear in his voice. "What does it mean?"

"It means we are running out of time," Jongleur said, coming up from behind them. His face was carefully expressionless, but his voice was not entirely steady. "The simulation is dying."

!Xabbu woke her with a light touch. "I am going to be away from the camp for some time," he whispered. "I do not think I want to leave you with those two."

Sam got sleepily to her feet and stumbled after him. The stars seemed brighter than ever, as though burning in premature mourning for the vanishing world beneath them.

When they reached the nearest hilltop, !Xabbu sat and began tying something around his ankles, circlets made from river reeds and seedpods that rattled when they moved.

"What are those for?" Sam asked.

"Dancing," he said. "Please, Sam, I need quiet now."

Rebuffed, she sat down beside him and drew her knees up under her chin. The cloak of woven leaves !Xabbu had made for her was little protection against the cold, but the night was mild. She watched him finish his preparations, then he walked a few steps away from her and stood, staring straight up at the sky and its blazing stars.

He stood there a long time. Sam drifted into sleep again, then started awake to find him still standing in the same place, frozen like a statue. Her mind wandered, touching mournfully on the stars over her own backyard where she and her father had camped in sleeping bags, Sam secure in his silent company despite the night sounds of the garden, reassured by her mother's silhouette in the kitchen window.

What are they doing now? They can't spend all their time with . . . with me. In some hospital. Do they do other things? Watch the net? Have dinner with friends? Even if I die here, they have to have some kind of normal life again, don't they? But it seemed wrong—unfair. But would it be worse if they never got over it?

Oh, God, Mom, Dad, I'm so sorry. . . !

Slowly, !Xabbu began to move, lifting one foot in the air and sawing it back and forth like an impatient horse pawing at the ground. He stepped forward, lifted the other foot and shook it, then set it down too. The rattles gave a quiet, dry hiss. Gradually he began to move in a distinctive and intricate rhythm, the steps made even more exotic by the near-silence.

At first Sam watched him closely, trying to guess from the small man's absorbed expression what might be going on in his mind, but the dance went on too lengthily, too repetitively, to hold her attention: as he finished the first slow trip around a circle only he could see, she found her thoughts beginning to scatter again. His precise movements reminded her of a game she had once played, something on the net she had loved for about two weeks when she was young, where oddly-shaped building blocks had floated slowly through space and could be pushed together into expanding geometric structures. Like !Xabbu's dance, the blocks had revolved as if both heavy and weightless. Their intricate, multifaceted sides had kissed and stuck with just the same blend of delicacy and permanence as the lifting and setting down of each of the small man's feet, as though it were not blind brute gravity that held him to the earth but an act of careful choice.

I wonder if Orlando ever played that game, she thought sleepily. I wonder what he would have made with it—something different, that's for sure. Something funny and sad.

I wonder what !Xabbu would make. . . .

And then she herself spun slowly away into another place, dreaming of dark high mountains and the lonely cries of birds.

"Wake up, Sam." His voice seemed odd: for a moment, the dreams still muddling her, she thought it was Orlando who spoke.

"Let me sleep, you damn scanmaster."

"The light is coming back. We do not have the time to sleep late today, I think."

She opened her eyes to find !Xabbu leaning over her, his face gleaming with sweat, his chest expanding and contracting as though he had just run a marathon. Nevertheless, he seemed full of energy. "Oh my God, I'm sorry. I thought you were. . . ." She rubbed her eyes. "Are you okay?"

"I am fine, Sam. I have done much thinking. It was good to dance, to . . . to be me again."

She let him help her up. Her feet felt cold and prickly; it took her a moment to stamp life back into them. "Did it help you think of anything?"

He smiled. "You are like Renie in this way, too. My dance is not like a . . . what is the name? Vending machine. Put in a card, out comes an answer. But I realized why I was troubled and the answer to that may help us." He laughed—he seemed lighter than he had in days, almost buoyant. "So we will see, Sam. Now come."

"What did you mean?" she asked as they walked back across the wet grass. It felt so real under her feet that it was hard to believe it might soon dissolve back into silvery nothingness, but the distant hills were frighteningly faint, a landscape carved in crystal. Without thinking, she hurried her steps. "When you said it was good to be you again?"

"Always I try to understand this place, to think like the people who built it, to think like Renie and you others do. But that is not really the way I think best. And it is strange for me—like wearing clothing that does not fit well. I cannot change an entire lifetime in a matter of weeks. Sometimes I must . . . go back. Go back to my old ways."

Sam nodded slowly. I think I know what you mean. I feel sometimes like I don't know who I am—who the real me is." Spurred by his quizzical look, she went on. "I mean, since I've been a girl again—you know, wearing this body—I don't talk the same, I don't even think the same, sort of. I start acting like . . . like a girl!"

His smile was gentle. "Is that bad?"

"Not always, no. But when I was just Fredericks, Orlando's shadow, another boy . . . I don't know. It was easier, somehow. I tried more things, I talked different." She laughed. "I swore more."

"Ah. And you have put your finger on it, Sam. That was one of the things that was troubling me."

Surprised, she tripped over a hummock and took a second to regain her footing. "You're troubled because I'm not swearing?"

"No. But wait—we are almost there. Soon you will see what I have been thinking."

Jongleur and Azador were sitting across the fire from each other, sullen and sleepy-eyed. The older man gave them a cold look as they approached. "So, after all your talk about necessity and danger, you find time to take a romantic walk? Very sweet!"

Sam felt her face grow hot and would have said something nasty, but !Xabbu touched her arm.

"There are many ways to solve problems," the small man said evenly. "But we need a new one, or we will still be here when this world melts around us."

Jongleur made a noise of disgust, "So it was a scouting expedition?"

"Of a sort." !Xabbu turned to Azador, who was watching blearily, perhaps regretting the absence of coffee in this meadow beyond the world. "I need to speak to you, Mr. Azador. I have some important questions to ask."

Something flickered behind his eyes, but he only waved his hand negligently. "Ask."

"Tell me again how you came here—how you reached the black mountain, then found yourself in this place."

Sam looked at !Xabbu, puzzled but trying not to show it, as Azador somewhat reluctantly reiterated the story of his arrival—following them into the maze in Demeter's temple, waking into pale nothingness to find the mountain gone.

"But I have been thinking," !Xabbu said abruptly as Azador neared the end of his story. "Thinking that we sat a long time on the side of the black mountain, arguing and talking, after we came through from Troy. Thinking that the gate was gone by the time we began to climb the trail. So how did you step through it without us seeing you?"

"Are you calling me a liar?" Azador half-rose, but sat down again when !Xabbu held up his hand in a calming gesture, as though the violent movement had been mostly bluff.

"Perhaps—but perhaps not." !Xabbu moved a few steps nearer, then seated himself beside the smoking remains of the campfire. Azador slid back a little. Sam found herself staring in fascination. What did !Xabbu know, or at least guess? Azador actually looked frightened. "I believe that you did follow us through," !Xabbu said, "and it could be you are telling what you remember—but I do not think it happened that way."

"Why are we wasting time on this trivia?" growled Jongleur.

"If you want to cross the river before this world disappears," !Xabbu said coolly, "I suggest you close your mouth."

As if the remark had been directed at him, Azador abruptly shut his own gaping jaw. "What are you saying?" he demanded after a moment. "That I am mad? That I don't know what the truth is? Or have you decided I am a simple liar after all?"

"How is it that you came through a gate that had closed, unless it opened again for you? How is it that you found your way off the mountain through all that gray nothing—something that for me needed all the tracking skill that my hunting people have learned in thousands of generations? How is it that you managed to push your raft upstream against the current to catch us? Most strange of all, why do you have clothes when the rest of us came here naked? What are the answers to any of these things if you have not been to this place before?" !Xabbu paused. "Whether you remember being here or not, that is another question."

"Yeah!" Sam said with dawning realization. "Scanbark! I didn't even think about that. He has clothes!"

"That is ridiculous!" Azador sputtered, but the haunted something was in his eyes again. "More sensible to call me a liar."

"If you like," !Xabbu said simply. "But there are other questions, too. Tell me of the Romany, Mr. Azador. Explain how you do not tell secrets to gorgios, as you told me before. How you and your Gypsy friends meet at Romany Fair, to pass stories and share information."

Now Azador truly did look befuddled, staring at the smaller man as though !Xabbu had started speaking in tongues. "What do you mean? I have never said any of those things to you—it was the girl who began this Gypsy nonsense."

Watching, Sam realized that her heart was beating painfully fast. Even Jongleur seemed stunned by what was going on.

!Xabbu shook his head. "No, Azador. You began it. In a prison cell, when I first met you. Then on a boat in a river in Kansas. Do you remember? You called me monkey-man, because I wore a baboon's body. . . ."

"You!" Azador leaped to his feet, sending the last embers of the fire in all directions. "You and your bitch of a friend—you stole my gold!" He lunged toward !Xabbu, who only took a step back.

"Stop!" Sam shrieked. She regretted the shrill, panicked sound, but not much. She yanked the haft and broken blade of Orlando's sword out of her waistband. "You touch him and I'll rip your guts out!"

"I will break your neck, girl," Azador snarled, but did not force the issue. Jongleur was on his feet now too, and for a moment they all stood frozen, a four-sided shape of mistrust.

"Before you do anything else," !Xabbu said, "tell me what we stole from you."

"My gold!" Azador shouted, but his face looked troubled, almost fearful. "My . . . gold."

"You do not remember what it was, do you?"

"I know you stole from me!"

!Xabbu shook his head. "We did not. We were separated by a failure of the system," he said as calmly as though Azador had not been glaring bloody murder at him, as though Sam were not standing with a broken sword in her hand leveled at the man's belly. "What do you truly remember? I think you have been here before, inside the so-called White Ocean. Can you not try to think? We are all in terrible danger."

Azador staggered back as though struck. His eyes wild, he waved his arms, then pointed at !Xabbu. "It is you—you are crazy! Azador is not crazy." He glared at Sam and her weapon, then at Jongleur. "All of you crazy!" A sob choked his words, "Not Azador!" He turned and ran limping out of the campsite, staggering across the meadow and up the slope of a low hill until he collapsed into the grass and lay there as if he had been shot.

"What have you done?" Jongleur demanded, but with little of his usual commanding tone.

"Saved us, perhaps. Go to him—I think he will not want either Sam or me to come near, but we need him."

Jongleur gaped as though !Xabbu, too, had thrown his arms in the air and begun to gibber. "Go to him. . . ?"

"Damn you, just go!" Sam shouted, waving the broken blade. "We were ready to leave you behind two days ago. Do something useful for a change!"

Jongleur appeared to consider several responses, but only turned his back on them and stalked off toward the fallen figure of Azador.

"That felt good!" said Sam. Her heart was still speeding.

"But Jongleur is an enemy that must be managed carefully," !Xabbu told her. "It is like handling a very poisonous snake—we should not tempt bad luck."

"How did you know? About Azador? And who is he? What is he?"

The confrontation over, !Xabbu seemed to shrink a little. "What Azador is, I cannot say for certain—not in a place as confusing as this network. But perhaps he is like the woman Ava we have all seen, or that boy that Jonas met—someone who drifts from world to world in this network, uncertain of his identity. Certainly he is not acting like the Azador I met before, who was very full of himself, too, but mostly cold and superior. And Jonas described an Azador who hardly spoke at all."

"You mean they're all different people?"

"I don't think so. But as I said, in this place, who knows?" !Xabbu seated himself beside the fire. "However, it is not who he is that is important now. Rather, it is where he has been."

"I don't understand."

!Xabbu gave her a weary grin. "Wait and see. Perhaps I will be correct again in my guesses and you will think me a very clever man. But if I am wrong, it will be less shameful if I have not bragged about what I think I can do. What comes next will be difficult."

"You seem different, too," Sam said suddenly. "I don't mean like a different person, but . . . but more confident."

"I have had time to listen to the ringing of the sun," he said. "Even though there is no sun here. To speak to the grandparent stars."

Sam shrugged. "I don't know what any of that means."

!Xabbu reached up and patted her arm. "It does not matter, Sam Fredericks. Now, let us see if we can work some magic on Mr. Azador."

"And what will you do if I don't cooperate?" Azador demanded. "Stab me with that sword?" He spoke with such an exaggerated tone of outrage that for a moment Sam could not help wondering if he might not be another stolen child hidden inside the shape of a grown man.

"It's tempting," she said quietly, but was quelled by !Xabbu's stern look.

"We will do nothing to you," the small man said. "We will simply go back to waiting for this world to disappear around us."

Jongleur stood a little apart, watching. He had regained his usual lizardlike reserve. Sam did not know what he had told the mustached man to bring him back, but she supposed she was grateful for it.

"I am in the hands of madmen," Azador said.

"That could be," !Xabbu replied. "But I promise no harm will come to you." He lifted his hand. "Give me your shirt."

Azador scowled, but stripped it off. !Xabbu took it and stood behind him, then rolled it and tied it around his eyes like a blindfold. "Can you see?"

"No, damn you, of course I can't!"

"It is important. Do not lie to me."

Azador waggled his head from side to side. "I can see nothing. If I break my leg, I will see the same happens to you, even if you gut me."

!Xabbu made a noise of irritation. "Nothing will happen. See, I will walk beside you, Sam on the other side. Come, Mr. Azador, you have said often enough that you are brave, resourceful. Why are you afraid to walk with your eyes covered?"

"I am not afraid. But the whole thing is stupid."

"Perhaps. Now the rest of us will be silent. We will walk beside the river. You will continue, please, until you feel it is a good place to cross."

Sam was puzzled but kept her peace. Even Jongleur appeared to be grudgingly interested in the experiment. They led Azador down to the last firm ground before the river-bank, then turned upstream.

They walked for a long time without talking, the quiet broken only by Azador's frustrated curses when he tripped on some unseen obstacle. In places the reed thickets grew so dense that they almost stumbled into the river; in other places the meadowlands stretched before them so openly that Sam felt her trust in !Xabbu's insights diminish. There was nothing but river and grass for as far as she could see. What difference would a man in a blindfold make?

After a while, Azador's reflexive grumbling began to die away. He moved like a sleepwalker now, walking stolidly forward, resting when the others rested, not even complaining when they wandered into mud. She heard him murmuring, but could not hear the words themselves.

Even the quality of his attention began to change as the first hour rolled into a second; a stillness came over him, and from time to time he stopped and tilted his head as though listening to something the others could not hear.

But by the time the light began to change, darkening just perceptibly as the middle of the day passed, they still had not found anything.

Look at us! Sam thought. Her feet hurt. She was hot and sticky. She felt a strong urge to lie down and let whatever was going to happen just happen, and had only kept herself moving during the last hour out of loyalty to !Xabbu. Azador's right—this is stupid. Four people stumbling along the river, looking for something when we already know its not here.

They were just making their way out of another whispering crowd of rushes when they saw the bridge.

Sam gasped. "But how. . . ? We've been here before! There wasn't . . . we didn't see. . . . Dzang!"

It was narrow, little more than a wall of piled stones with arch-shaped holes to let the river flow through, but it was wide enough for them all to walk across side by side. Most importantly of all, it stretched all the way to the meadows on the river's far bank—or seemed to, in any case: the other end of the bridge was obscured by low mists.

"You may uncover your eyes," !Xabbu told Azador.

Alone of them all, Azador showed no surprise, as though he had in some way seen the bridge already. Nevertheless, there was a frightened glint to his stare, and after a moment, he turned away. "I . . . I do not want to go there."

"We have no choice," !Xabbu said firmly. "Come. Lead us over."

Azador shook his head, but reluctantly moved toward the near end of the span. He hesitated for a moment before stepping up. !Xabbu followed him, then Sam and Jongleur. Sam marveled at the stony solidity of the thing—she knew they had passed this very spot only a day or so before, but no bridge had stood here.

Azador took a few steps, then stopped. "No," he said, his voice oddly distant. "First we . . . we must say something."

They all waited expectantly.

"Gray goose and gander,"

Azador murmured at last, his voice heavy with some emotion Sam could not decipher,

"Waft your wings together,

And carry the good king's daughter

Over the one-strand river."

After a moment he looked back at them, then stepped out onto the stone path above the glinting, slow-moving waters. Sam was disturbed to see that the man's eyes, hidden for so long, were now wet with tears.