“Bigshot,” said Shaknahyi.
Both Chiri and I waited until our heartbeats slowed down to normal. Courane brought a tray with the fresh drinks, and I watched Chiri throw hers down in two long gulps. She was fortifying herself for whatever evil things I was going to do to her mind. She was going to need it.
Chiri touched Player Two on the game’s console, and I saw her eyes slowly close. She looked as if she were napping placidly. That was going to end in a hell of a hurry. On the holoscreen was the same opalescent haze I’d wandered through until Chiri’d decided it was the ocean. I reached out and touched the Player One panel.
Audran gazed down upon the ball of mist, like Allah in the highest of the heavens. He concentrated on building a richly detailed illusion, and he was pleased with his progress. Instead of letting it take on form and reality gradually, Audran loosed an explosion of sensory information. The woman far below was stunned by the purity of color in this world, the clarity of sound, the intensity of the tastes and textures and smells. She cried out and her voice pealed in the cool, clean air like a carillon. She fell to her knees, her eyes shut tightly and her hands over her ears.
Audran was patient. He wanted the woman to explore his creation. He wasn’t going to hide behind a tree, jump out, and frighten her. There was time enough for terror later.
After a while the woman lowered her hands and stood up. She looked around uncertainly. “Marîd?” she called. Once again the sound of her own voice rang with unnatural sharpness. She glanced behind her, toward the misty purple mountains in the west. Then she turned back to the east, toward the shore of a marshy lake that reflected the impossible azure of the sky. Audran didn’t care which direction she chose; it would all be the same in the end.
The woman decided to follow the swampy shoreline to the southeast. She walked for hours, listening to the liquid trilling of songbirds and inhaling the poignant perfume of unknown blossoms. After a while the sun rested on the shoulders of the purple hills behind her, and then slipped away, leaving Audran’s illusion in darkness. He provided a full moon, huge and gleaming silver like a serving platter. The woman grew weary, and at last she decided to lie down in the sweet-smelling grass and sleep.
Audran woke her in the morning with a gentle rain shower. “Marîd?” she cried again. He would not answer her. “How long you gonna leave me here?” She shivered.
The golden sun mounted higher, and while it warmed the morning, the heat never became stifling. Just after noon, when the woman had walked almost halfway around the lake, she came upon a pavilion made of crimson and sapphire-blue silk. “What the hell is all this, Marîd?” the woman shouted. “Just get it over with, all right?”
The woman approached the pavilion anxiously. “Hello?” she called.
A moment later a young woman in a white gown came out of the pavilion. Her feet were bare and her pale blonde hair was thrown carelessly over one shoulder. She was smiling and carrying a wooden tray. “Hungry?” she asked in a friendly voice.
“Yes,” said the woman.
“My name is Maryam. I’ve been waiting for you. I’m sorry, all I’ve got is bread and fresh milk.” She poured from a silver pitcher into a silver goblet.
“Thanks.” The woman ate and drank greedily.
Maryam shaded her eyes with one hand. “Are you going to the fair?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know about any fair.”
Maryam laughed. “Everybody goes to the fair. Come on, I’ll take you.”
The woman waited while Maryam disappeared into the pavilion again with the breakfast things. She came back out a moment later. “We’re all set now,” she said gaily. “We can get to know each other while we walk.”
They continued around the lake until the woman saw a scattering of large, peaked tents of striped canvas, all with colorful pennants snapping in the breeze. She heard many people laughing and shouting; and the sound of axes biting wood, and metal ringing on metal. She could smell bread baking, and cinnamon buns, and lamb roasting on spits turning slowly over glowing coals. Her mouth began to water and she felt her excitement growing despite herself.
“I don’t have any money to spend,” she said.
“Money?” Maryam asked, laughing. “What is money?”
The woman spent the afternoon going from tent to tent, seeing the strange exhibits and miraculous entertainments. She sampled exotic foods and drank concoctions of unknown liquors. Now and then she remembered to be afraid. She looked over her shoulder, wondering when the pleasant face of this fantasy would fall away. “Marîd,” she called, “what are you doing?”
“Who are you calling?” asked Maryam.
“I’m not sure,” said the woman.
Maryam laughed, “hook over here,” she said, pulling on the woman’s sleeve, showing her a booth where a heavily muscled woman was shaping a disturbing collage from the claws, teeth, and eyes of lizards.
They listened to children playing strange music on instruments made from the carcasses of small animals, and then they watched several old women spin their own white hair into thread, and then weave it into napkins and scarves.
One of the toothless hags leered at Maryam and the woman. “Take,” she said in a gravelly voice.
“Thank you, grandmother,” said Maryam. She selected a pair of human-hair handkerchiefs.
The hours wore on, and at last the sun began to set. The moon rose as full as yestereve. “Is this going to go on all night?” the woman asked.
“All night and all day tomorrow,” said Maryam. “Forever.”
The woman shuddered.
From that moment she couldn’t shake a growing dread, a sense that she’d been lured to this place and abandoned. She remembered nothing of who she’d been before she’d awakened beside the lake, but she felt she’d been horribly tricked. She prayed to someone called Marîd. She wondered if that was God.
“Marîd,” she murmured fearfully, “I wish you’d just end this already.”
But Audran was not ready to end it. He watched as the woman and Maryam grew sleepy and found a large tent filled with comfortable cushions and sheets of satin and fine linen. They laid themselves down and slept.
In the morning the woman arose, dismayed to be still trapped at the eternal fair. Maryam found them a good breakfast of sausage, fried bread, broiled tomatoes, and hot tea. Maryam’s enthusiasm was undiminished, and she led the woman toward still more disquieting entertainments. The woman, however, felt only a crazily mounting dread.
“You’ve had me here for two days, Marîd,” she pleaded. “Please kill me and let me go.” Audran gave her no sign, no answer.
They passed the third day examining one dismaying thing after another: teenage girls who seemed to have living roses in place of breasts; a candle maker whose wares would not provide light in the presence of an infidel; staged combat between a blind man and two maddened dragons; a family hammering together a scale model of the fair out of iron, a project that had occupied them for generations and that might never be completed; a cage of crickets that had been taught to chirp the Shahada, the Islamic testament of faith.