But even this horror was not the worst. On a lump of mossy stone at the river's edge stood a pair of contrasting shapes, like generals surveying the progress of a campaign. Kunohara's focus drove closer. Despite the more important threat of the wasps, who now formed a solid wall of carapace and claw all over the bubble-house, Paul could not tear his eyes from the two figures.
One was a massively bloated caterpillar, its pillowy segments the color of corpse flesh, with a face even more disturbingly humanoid than those of the mutant army, tiny porcine eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth. Beside it teetered a cricket white as paper, rubbing its legs together in some unheard music. Its long face was as queerly personalized as the caterpillar's, except for the blank spot where eyes should have been.
"The Twins," Paul said. "Oh, God. He's sent the Twins after us."
"There is another," said Florimel. "See, riding on that beetle."
Paul stared at the pale human shape, bumping on the back of a shiny shell. "Who is it?"
Kunohara was scowling. "Robert Wells, I suspect, A pity the scorpion did not get him, too."
The tiny figure waved his arm, sending another squadron of beetles marching down to the water's edge to give their lives to the growing chain.
"The bastard is having fun." observed Kunohara.
CHAPTER 7
The Man from Mars
NETFEED/DRAMA-LIVE: "Warrior of Sprootie School"
(visuaclass="underline" Wengweng Cho's practice room)
CHO: Chen Shuo, the time has come for action! My daughter Zia has been stolen by the evil Wolf's Jaw school, and they mean to practice their spiritually incorrect and deadly martial arts style on her.
(audio over: gasps)
SHUO: By the sacred Sprootie, we must not let such a thing happen!
CHO: You are a brave man and a true warrior. Quickly, now, take my treasured throwing stars and go with haste to save my daughter.
SHUO: I will come back to you with the severed head of the Wolfs Jaw master, and with your daughter Zia safe.
(audio over: applause, cheers)
SHUO (to himself): But I must pray that my devotion to the sacred Sprootie will give me strength to achieve this task, because the minions of the Wolfs Jaw school are many and devious. Still—where Sprootie is, bravery is!
(audio over: even louder applause)
Mrs. Sorensen—Kaylene, she had told him her name was—had just come back from checking on the two children in the connecting room, which gave everyone a chance to catch their breath. Catur Ramsey, in particular, was grateful for the pause. He had never had such a strange day in his entire life, which included a college flirtation with psychedelics.
"Christabel seems okay," she reported. "She's sleeping. The little boy's curled up on the floor. I got him bathed again, but I couldn't even get him to use the other bed."
"She's been through a lot," said Michael Sorensen. "If I had imagined . . . God almighty, what have we gotten ourselves into?"
The strange, wizened figure in the rented wheelchair looked up. "I am truly sorry to have involved your family, Mrs. Sorensen. Desperation forces us to do shameful things."
The woman wrestled for a moment against her obvious urge to say something polite, and won. She had clearly not recovered from the horror of hearing Major Sorensen's cleaned-up version of what had happened in Yacoubian's suite. While Ramsey had tried to entertain a shell-shocked Christabel and the rather sullen little Hispanic boy, she had taken her husband to the adjoining room and, as Sorensen put it afterward, "let me know she wasn't very happy about how things were going."
In his own exhausted state, Ramsey was having trouble coping with the tension and unhappiness in the room, not to mention the bizarre story that Sellars had just told, full of the kind of conspiracy theories that even the loopier chat nodes would scorn. He needed a few moments to clear his head.
"I'm going out to grab a soft drink," he said. "Anybody want anything?"
Kaylene Sorensen shook her head wearily, but Ramsey couldn't help noticing the flicker of suspicion across her husband's face. It stung. "Oh, for God's sake, Sorensen, if I were going to bail out on you or betray you or something. don't you think it would be easier for me to wait and do it when I go back to my own motel?"
To his credit, Sorensen looked shamefaced. "I didn't mean to look that way. I'm just . . . it's been difficult, today."
Ramsey forced a smile. "It sure has. Back in a second."
He caught himself as he started to swipe his card through the drink machine's reader.
Sorensen's paranoia is better sense than you've got, he told himself. That was a real brigadier general that had us kidnapped out of a public restaurant Whatever this is, it isn't entirely someone's overheated imagination. He found he had a few coins, and even briefly considered trying to wipe his prints off them before dropping them into the slot.
Sellars' story, whether Sorensen and his family believed it or not, was patently impossible. Ramsey had been dubious but had tried to remain open-minded about the idea that Tandagore's Syndrome might be a purposeful human creation. He had even begun to suspect that there really was some connection between Orlando Gardiner's condition and the reports of the boy's software agent about some kind of network where Orlando was conscious but trapped. He had been willing, in short, to believe in a strange set of circumstances, even collusion between powerful people. But this? This was something out of a fever dream—a conspiracy among many of Earth's richest men and women to become gods. It was beyond belief that such a thing could exist, let alone that it could be kept silent for years, especially when the mechanism seemed to depend on destroying innocent children. The whole insane notion was like something out of a potboiler—a gruesomely overblown net drama. It simply could not be.
If he had been hearing it all for the first time, Catur Ramsey would have courteously thanked everyone for their time after ten minutes and gone home, keeping his thoughts about the sanity of these people to himself. But he had been living with the strange online world of Orlando Gardiner for weeks, and had begun to think of a software agent in the shape of a cartoon bug as a reliable informant. Before she closed up her house and disappeared, he had heard a woman who by her own admission had spent time in a mental health facility tell him that one of the world's most successful children's entertainment companies was part of a hideous experiment on those selfsame children, and he had begun to wonder if she might be correct. It wasn't as though he was close-minded—hadn't he first met Sellars in the back alleys of a VR gameworld? Where he, Catur Ramsey, respectable attorney, had been running around dressed as a barbarian swordsman? He had to admit that Sellars had told him things about Orlando Gardiner and Salome Fredericks that even Ramsey himself, with total access to both families, hadn't yet discovered.
He sipped his drink and watched the traffic slide past.
Sellars was asking him to believe in something that made the worst pamphleteering nonsense about Freemasons and Rosicrucians seem unambitious. And just to cap it all off, what had Major Sorensen said about Sellars? That he wasn't even human?
For a moment he truly considered walking to his car and driving home. Telling Jaleel and Enrica Fredericks that he'd found nothing to explain their daughter's coma, deleting Olga Pirofsky's name from his call list. Putting the whole thing into the "who knows what the hell that was about?" category and getting back to his other clients, his more-or-less life.