“You don’t think Dr. Chandra Falcon is good enough?” Misaki seemed to be bristling a little. Too many classic Old Earth movies from male-supremacy eras.
“I think Dr. Chandra might be too good. In some ways. Think about it. Deuces Osborne, Steve Davis, Pete Schultz, Bob Lozinski…seems to be building into a ring of males, informants as well as investigators. If Osborne had been expecting either of the women of that household to meet him in Ishmael’s Downtown… But as things stand, go in as myself, and I might scare Lozinski off, look like Mata Hari or Delilah to him. No, I think this calls for a little ‘male bonding’ to have the best chances of opening him up. Let’s see… I think I should be dressed like a hiker, Victorian style…tweed knickers and leather knapsack, wasn’t it? That kind of gear.”
“Why the knapsack?” asked Harriet. “Just a prop?”
“A little more than that.” Chandra thought back, not only over her Mahabharata adventure with Omar, but also over climbing the Himalayas and so on in the uptown booths. “For virtual supplies. This could turn out to be a lot like any virtual adventure of the more gardenhouse variety. And I’d like to have a virtual copy of the Gilbert and Sullivan librettos along, tucked away where whoever I meet—’in there’—won’t notice it. If his world itself is grounded in G. and S., they probably won’t have any reference copies of those librettos, not as we’d recognize them. To Lozinski and his virtual characters, whatever isn’t the living actuality of Gilbert and Sullivan’s world, will be history-book stuff.”
Serious though the situation was, Chandra found herself looking forward to it.
* * * *
Music. A light, infectious medly breaking over and over into the well-loved tunes. In glorious synesthesia, the notes as bunches of round, phosphorescent grapes when the melody was smooth, jagged splinters of brilliance when the tune burst into staccato. During the quick tempos, dozens of cross-winds like a concatenation of miniature tornadoes buffeted her free-falling body. While during the sweet-flowing interludes she drifted softly, as though through a giant crystal decanter filled with thick, perfumed syrup. During one slow, vaguely familiar melody, she floated down upon a pear swollen to the size of a grand piano. “Pear-shaped tones,” she thought almost dreamily, slicing her hand through the mushy surface and scooping out a lump of soft pulp. Even as she sucked its sweet juice, a new burst of march tempo shook her up to the top of the fluid again—as if Lozinski’s virtual dream were welcoming her in…‘her’ no longer…
The fluid churned ever faster, glints of colored light shooting through it, bubbles forming, fizzing upwards, bursting around Dr. Charles Falcon. The invisible yet tangible orchestra crescendoed towards its grand finale, building louder and faster into a frenzied climax. Chunks of sharp-faceted arpeggios slammed against his skin, needle-sharded bubbles burst inside his ears, nose, armpits…
A great, shattering crash, as if a pair of cymbals had smashed together on the decanter of churning liquid. He felt himself draining out with the champagne, coming to rest on a sandy surface through which the fluid drained from around him, while the thunder of the cymbals echoed gradually into silence.
* * * *
After a while, he rolled over onto his back and blinked a few times at the haze-shrouded sun. Then he stood and took a thorough look around. He was on a coastline of high, rocky cliffs and craggy, moss-encrusted boulders. Above was a sky scudding gray with piles of cloud; below, a white-cresting ocean that foamed over the rocks in weird silence for a few moments until the sound effects—temporarily exhausted by that last musical crescendo?—caught up again with the visuals.
Chuck Falcon turned to face inland. Gray, matted grass that might be green under a sunnier sky; straggling fields marked with rough stone fences; in one pasture a few brown sheep grazing around a ring-shaped stone set up on end. A few fields further, a small graveyard with tangles of twisted black gorse growing up around leaning tombstones. Beyond that, a castle, massive, black, menacing. Not exactly the light, cheeky umwelt he had aimed for.
But, yes, there were castles in the Gilbert and Sullivan world. And the castle was a fairly common symbol, worn deep in the human consciousness. So that one was the logical place to start looking for Bob Lozinski. Dr. Falcon hitched his backpack and started hiking across the fields.
For about fifty yards he strode over spongy grass. For another thirty or forty he followed the hint of a groove through hip-high prickles of gorse. Arriving at last at the stone fence around the sheep pasture, he put one hand on top and vaulted over. (Even Chandra Falcon could have done it—perhaps more easily than Chuck Falcon. If he was more muscular, with greater upper body strength, she carried less weight and was equally athletic.) He landed lightly; the sheep looked up at the slight jarring, and calmly returned to their grazing.
As he neared the standing, doughnut-shaped stone, he paused, sensing the presence of another person in the field. He took a closer look at the stone. On the lower edge of the center hole, he saw a brownish tangle that might have been some strange plant growth, or a small animal with long, shaggy fur, or the back of a human head.
Someone, he guessed, was lying on the other side of the stone, using the lower edge of its center hole for a pillow. He turned toward the stone, walking softly enough not to disturb a sleeper, but firmly enough to avoid the appearance of stealth.
When he was about three meters from the stone, the bunch of brown hair shook itself and rolled over, bringing a face into view—a woman’s face, dirty and piquant, with broad forehead, wide green eyes, and a small pointed chin, resting now on the stone.
She studied him for a moment, solemnly, then wriggled up through the doughnut-stone’s hole. The effect was almost like the slow materialization from the head and shoulders down of a supernatural being. There were fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan. But this young woman was in rags, one shoulder left bare by the ripping of a sleeve, the skin of her arms and legs covered with dirt and scratches, her waist-length reddish hair tangled thick with twigs and wilted wildflowers. Hardly the attire of a fairy, no matter how elfin her face!
“Good afternoon,” Chuck Falcon began, taking a step forward.
She remained for a moment leaning against the stone, ignoring his offer of friendship, staring at him with such a blank expression that he could not be sure she really saw him. Then suddenly, with a wild laugh, she ducked behind the stone, poked her head out through the hole again, smiled up rakishly at him, and said, “When the foxgloves drip dark nectar, we’ll have time enough then for my lady’s own dinner-party.”
He stepped back and rubbed his chin, considering. He had rather expected to recognize Bob Lozinski right away, but in the Mahabharata world Omar had appeared as Yudhisthira and Chandra as Draupadi. And it might be as normal to switch genders in this application of virtual reality as in the commoner varieties. Wasn’t Chandra herself appearing as Chuck?
The woman had started to sing:
“The cat and the dog and the little puppee
Sat down in a—
“Are you a gentleman?” she asked, breaking into speech. “Or do you go to church on Tuesday morning with a great black hat on your head and a basket of charity suppers in your hand?” She plucked a daisy from her hair and began meditatively eating it, gazing at Chuck Falcon from her upside-down angle.
He leaned over and gently took her arm. “There’s a storm coming up. I think you’d better come with me to find shelter.”
A flicker of understanding seemed to come into her face, and with it a look of terror. “No!” she cried, jumping up and spinning away from his touch. “You want to go there!” She pointed one thin finger at the castle looming a few fields away, just beyond the graveyard.
“Do you know of a better place to find shelter?” He was careful to keep his voice quiet.
“Don’t go there! You mustn’t go there!” She darted around the carved stone, across the field, and clambered up the fence.
He