The greater weight of the older versions might have been a useful advantage, for now the Jack Sprat creature surprised him with a backhanded blow and lifted him completely off his feet, smashing him to the earth just a few meters from the quivering form of the wife-thing. The second monster slithered forward with surprising speed then rose and folded over him like a huge, living jelly. For a heart-tripping moment Sam thought Orlando had disappeared into the immense mouth; instead the blade of his sword suddenly poked out through the side of the thing's head and it contracted away from the attack, roaring liquidly. Orlando had thrown himself to one side to avoid its killing stoop and now managed to jackknife away from a follow-up swipe by Jack Sprat, which had hurried forward to grab him while he was engaged with its blubberous companion.
The wife, its head streaming with fluids from its wound, attacked again, catching him between the two of them. Both creatures had learned their lesson and moved in on him with greater caution. He backed away, trying to lengthen the triangle, but he had the Well behind him and was running out of room.
Sam's joy had turned to helpless misery. There was no way he could beat them both. She was watching him die all over again. She hit out at the hands restraining her but her friends would not let go. "Run!" she screamed. "Run, Orlando!"
He took a last step backward. As his heel teetered on the edge of the Well he threw a quick glance back at its flickering impermanence. His measured but fearful gaze was enough to tell Sam a terrible truth: he had come out of it, but he could not go back into it and survive.
He'll break up again if he goes in, she thought wildly—he'll disappear. She did not know how she knew it but she was certain: there was not enough energy left in the Well to make him again.
Make him? But that's Orlando, it really is Orlando. . . !
The Jack Sprat creature limped toward him on its wounded legs, swinging its arms like giant brooms, trying nothing more ambitious than to force him over the rim of the pit. With no room left he did the only thing he could: he leaped forward between the flailing hands and rolled into the thing's scrawny legs like a bowling ball. A leg cracked with a dry pop and the monster tottered, giving out a whistling shriek of rage. It staggered, hobbled a step, and as it regained its balance began to reach down, but Orlando was behind it now. He chopped through the wounded leg with a two-handed stroke. As it teetered on its remaining leg he threw his weight against it and shoved it toward the Well.
Jack Sprat toppled over the edge, but managed to sink its fingers into the soft soil and cling, its long legs kicking above the roiling waters. It had even begun to pull itself back up but Orlando dodged a hammering, sideways blow from the other beast and hacked the grasping fingers into splinters. Jack Sprat slid into the pulsing depths, shrieking and whistling like a boiling lobster, then surfaced for a moment with arms thrashing before it dissolved at last into the glimmering substance of the Well.
The monstrous, gelatinous form of the wife-thing humped up behind Orlando, spluttering in fury. He had only a fraction of an instant to jump away as it smashed down like a titan fist made of putty. It oozed quickly to the side to trap him against the precipice then stretched upward again, its mouth hanging open in an idiot gape that made it look like some kind of giant, cancerous sock puppet. Before it could drop and crush him Orlando shoved the blade of his sword deep into its bulk, then struggled around to one side, dragging the blade with him, his long muscles knotting as he pulled it through the rubbery flesh even as the creature folded down on top of him.
Sam's heart stuttered and seemed to stop entirely until Orlando scrabbled back out from under the bulky thing, covered with its slime. The sound of the creature's anger went sharper in pitch, into pain and even fright. It heaved upward again but something viscous was running out of the long jagged hole across its middle. Jack Sprat's wife swayed, grew slack as a deflating balloon, then collapsed and slid over the edge in a wet, sticky glob and vanished into the Well.
Sam was already up and running, forcing her way through the stunned refugees, leaping over the dead and dying without any thought for them at all. Orlando turned away from the edge of the Well, staggered, and fell to his knees.
"Orlando!" she screamed. "Oh, dzang, Gardiner, is it really you?" She crouched and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't die, you better not die! Oh, God, I knew you couldn't be dead. You came back! Like Gandalf! You utterly came back!"
He turned his head to look at her. For a moment he seemed to be looking at a stranger and her stomach contracted. Then he smiled. It was a miserable, weary smile, but she thought it was the most wonderful thing she had seen in her whole life. "But I am dead, Frederico," he said. "I really am."
"No, you're not!" She hugged him as hard as she could. She was weeping, babbling—she didn't care, she didn't know anything, he was alive, alive! The others were running toward them but she did not want to let go, ever. "No, you're not. You're here."
After a long moment he pulled back a little. "Gandalf?" He peered at her, tried to blink away his own tears, then laughed. "Damn, you did read it. You read it but you never told me. You are such a scanmaster, Fredericks." And then he collapsed in her arms.
CHAPTER 42
Old School
NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons
(visuaclass="underline" new facility at Totness)
VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.
(visuaclass="underline" Vicenta Omarid, Vice-chairman, Resist!)
OMARID: "Our country is not a dumping ground for toxic waste or toxic humanity. This is a cynical exploitation by the first world nations of their own people and ours, an attempt to hide the consequences of their own jail-the-poor policies by waving money under the noses of hungry nations like Trinidad and Tobago. . . ."
At first Sellars had no idea where he was. He was sunk deep in a padded seat that felt more like a womb than a chair, surrounded, comforted, connected. The great window before him was full of burning points of light and he could feel the almost silent vibration of engines—no, not just feel the vibrations, he realized, but discern the actual working of the antiproton drive, every detail of its performance as well as the ship's million other functions, all flooding into his altered nervous system. He was flying through the stars.
"It's the Sally Ride," he murmured. My ship. . . ! My beautiful ship.
But something was wrong.
How did I get here? Memories were seeping back now, a kaleidoscope of days, of fire and terror followed by years of isolation. Of a past in which this silver seed had been blasted to twisted wreckage in a hangar in South Dakota without ever having flown outside the lower thermosphere.
But the stars. . . ! There they are, bigger than life. Could it be that everything else I thought was real, the destruction of PEREGRINE, my long imprisonment, wax it all just a dream—a cold-sleep nightmare?