Blow Me Down (6 page)

“Aye, I do. I’ve this house,” she answered after a minute, her eyes troubled. “Ye’ll be wantin’ somethin’ to put in yer belly, no doubt.”

“Well . . . I suppose I could spend a few more minutes here,” I said, strangely unwilling to leave. “At least until we work out a trade for these clothes. But then I really do have to get cracking and collect my officer legs. I made this deal with my daughter, and somehow I keep getting sidetracked.”

Renata gave me an odd look as we walked back to the room with the fireplace. Despite the warmth of the day, there was a fire in the fireplace—and a haunch of something roasting away on an antique-looking spit. “Full marks for the game maker for going into such details,” I said, sniffing the air. The scent of the roasting meat mingled with something salty and tangy that reminded me of my childhood summers spent on the northern Oregon coast. “This really is amazing. My mouth is actually watering.”

“Eh, lass, there be somethin’ ye be needin’ to know,” Renata said as she plucked a battered wooden plate from a stack on an equally battered sideboard. She turned the haunch on the spit, pulling a knife from her belt to hack off a few strips of meat. I stared in growing horror at the plate she shoved toward me. “This no longer be a game ye’re in.”

“Um . . . is this . . . uh . . . what exactly is it?” I asked, glancing between the plate of meat slices and the oozing, still bloody slab of meat roasting over the fire.

“ ’Tis a perfectly good bit of mutton,” Renata answered.

I looked at her. “I don’t want to sound rude or ungrateful or anything, because I appreciate you giving me the clothes when I don’t have any money or anything but my financial skills to barter, but man alive, the California Health Department would have kittens over your idea of safe food handling and cooking. That’s still bloody!”

She looked to where I was pointing at the cooking meat. “Aye, but the bit ye’ve got isn’t. Ye be needed somethin’ to wash it down, I’m willin’ to wager.”

“No, thank you, that’s not necessary—” Renata ignored me as she bustled over to where a small keg rested on the sideboard. She wiped out a couple of metal tankards with the hem of her skirt, filling both with a dark, thick-looking ale. “I’m alcohol-intolerant, I’m afraid. It’s the sulfites. They trigger migraines.”

“Ye not hungry?” she asked, shoving one of the two tankards into my hand despite my objections. “Sit down and eat, lass. Ye’re about to have a bit of a shock, and ye’ll be needin’ a bit of food in yer belly to get ye past it.”

“Shock? What kind of a shock can a computer game give me? Other than the kind from a faulty laptop plug, that is,” I asked, obediently sitting down at the small table she’d indicated. The smell of the cooking meat had my stomach rumbling uncomfortably, reminding me that I’d missed dinner in my haste to get the press release ready. I poked at the long strips of meat, looking them over carefully. “Oh, what the hell. If I pick up a computer version of E. coli, so be it. Do you have a fork?”

Renata looked at me as if I had three heads. “Nay, lass. We use our eatin’ knives here. Ah, ye’ve not got one? Lucky then I’ve a spare.” She hoisted up her skirt and pulled a short-bladed knife from the garter holding up a ratty pair of stockings, shoving it into my hand.

“No, that’s okay, I don’t need to take your spare . . . er . . . leg knife . . .” I held the knife by the very tips of two fingers, wondering whether she really expected me to eat with a utensil that had been strapped to her leg. “I’ll just use my fingers, if you don’t mind my ill manners. Now, about the skills I have to offer—I’m a bit fuzzy about just what sort of business it is you’re running here . . .”

The door leading to the hall burst open as my words faded on my lips. A redheaded woman clad in an almost translucent blouse and similar lace-bedecked petticoat raced into the room, giggling as she cast provocative glances over her shoulder. On her heels was a middle-aged man with a short salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a pair of boots . . . and nothing else.

“Lay up, ye blighted minx! I’m not as fast on me pins as ye are!”

The woman raced around the table and headed back out the door, scattering giggles and come-hither looks behind her. The naked man, a pirate if the earrings and weathered look were anything to go by, followed without giving Renata or me a second glance.

“Oh,” I said, as the door slammed behind the couple. “That sort of business. You’re a . . . er . . . this is a . . . uh . . .”

“Sportin’ house, aye,” Renata said, taking a healthy swig from her mug of ale. “That be Red Beth, another of me girls. Ye not be one of them lasses with yer nose stuck high up in the air who look down on us, be ye?”

“Me? Oh, absolutely not. My nose is right here, perfectly level. I’m known for being very open-minded. Ask anyone. I’m all for . . . er . . . sportin’. Big fan of it.”

“Are ye, now,” she asked, her eyebrows doing a surprised little waggle. “Ye don’t have the look about ye.”

“Oh, I’m not a . . . that is, I don’t do it for money.”

“Ah? That’s mighty charitable of ye, dearie, but ye’re due somethin’ for yer troubles.”

“No, no, you’re misunderstanding. I don’t have sex professionally. It’s more a hobby . . . oh, that doesn’t sound right. I meant that I’m an amateur at it . . . er . . . that is, I know what I’m doing and what goes where and the approximate time and actions needed to achieve . . . oh, hell, I’m just making this worse, aren’t I?”

Renata laughed as I stuffed a piece of undercooked mutton into my mouth more to shut myself up than to satisfy the gnawing hunger. “That ye are, dearie; that ye are. If’n ye’ve had enough to eat, p’raps now would be a good time to have that talk I’ve been hintin’ at.”

“Absolutely,” I said, pushing the now-empty plate away. With no other beverage offered, I took a few cautious sips of ale to wash down the last of the meat, figuring that unless the game’s creators spent way too much time ensuring that the game duplicated every last aspect of real life, I should be safe from the threat of an alcohol-induced migraine. “As to that, I believe I can be of some use to you. After all, a business of this sort is no different from any other that provides a service. I will simply use the standard small business model and adapt it for your specific needs. If you could bring out your financial records, receipts, bank statements, and a list of expenses that I can itemize, I’ll get started and work you up a business plan that will allow you to run with a tightly controlled budget, and yet save sufficient funds for your retirement.”

Renata looked at me like three naked customers were dancing on my head. “Financial records? I’ve this house, dearie.”

“No receipts? No tax statements from years past?”

She shook her head, still giving me a wary look.

“Okay. We start from scratch. That’s doable, too. Do you have paper and a pencil?” I asked, looking around the room. “I could work up a model for you now, just something basic so you know where you stand, financially.”

“I’ve no parchment, no,” Renata answered, a frown pulling her brows together as she watched me over the rim of her tankard. “ ’Tis dear, parchment.”

“Dear? Oh, expensive. Gotcha. Hmm.” I tapped my fingers on the table and considered my situation. Clearly there was going to be more to achieving the officer level of the game than just collecting wooden limbs. No doubt the game’s creator felt some sort of a teamwork challenge was necessary. “What I really need is a spreadsheet. I’d be able to adapt one for you with just a couple of keystrokes, but I don’t suppose there’s any way to get one in the game environment?”

Renata just stared at me.

“Right; I thought not.” I tapped my lower lip, thinking hard. “Tell you what—I’ll quit the game and load up a spreadsheet, give it a quick modification and plug in some basic numbers, then print out the data and pop back into the game so I can read it to you. Does that work for you?”

She was shaking her head even before I finished speaking.

“Don’t like spreadsheets?” I asked.

“Aye, I like my sheets spread, but that be not what I’m shakin’ me head over, dearie. It’s this idea ye have about leavin’ us and returnin’ to yer previous life.”

“Don’t let it worry you,” I said, waving an airy hand. “I promised my daughter I’d make it to the officer level of the game, and I thoroughly intend to fulfill that promise. To be honest,” I said, leaning forward across the table, “just between you and me—I’m getting a kick out of this whole thing. It’s going to cost me to admit to Tara that she was right about a little playtime, but the truth is, this pirate stuff is a bit of a long-suppressed fantasy of mine. I’m not so sold on the game as she is, naturally, but I can see the attraction of such a virtual diversion.”

Renata’s rheumy-eyed gaze held mine. “ ’Tis not just virtual, dearie.”

“What isn’t?” I said on a laugh, my smile fading when her face remained watchful. “Oh, I get it. You’re not programmed to acknowledge that this world isn’t real. Sorry. Didn’t mean to—”

“Nay. I ken well enough the origins of this world. But ye don’t be understandin’ that for ye, it’s more than just a game.”

A faint prick of unease skittered down my back. “What do you mean by that? Of course it isn’t real. It’s pretend, a virtual world, nothing more.”

Silence filled the room for a moment while she worked through what she wanted to say. “For others, that may be; I cannot say. But for ye, dearie . . . ye’re a part of our world just as much as Red Beth and her Jack Tar are.”

“No, no, no, no,” I said, mentally asking myself why I bothered trying to argue with a computer character. “I’m real. You aren’t. Neither is Red Beth and her boyfriend, or that dead man outside the inn, or that handsome Corbin, or the sheep that woke me up, or anything else here.”

She just stared at me with a bit of a pitying touch to her eyes.

“Fine. You want me to prove it? Watch.” I reached up to my face, intending to pull off the virtual reality glasses, but there was nothing there. “Um . . . okay. There’s got to be a trigger or something somewhere to generate the computer interface.”

I looked around the room for inspiration, examining everything from my hands (you never knew) to the surroundings for something that would bring up the computer interface. A sense of claustrophobic panic welled up within me as my searching grew more and more frantic.

“Maybe it’s where I woke up,” I said, dashing out of the building to the nearby alley. As I searched the alley for a magic door, or computer keyboard, or even just a big button that said PUSH HERE FOR REAL LIFE, the panic was joined by a horrible sense of life spiraling out of my control.

“No,” I said after a fruitless twenty-minute search. I kicked at a wooden water bucket and spun around, desperate for something that would take me out of what had turned into a nightmare. “No, this can’t be happening to me. It’s a game, a computer game. There were virtual reality glasses. I put them on and, whammo, I was in the game. So, therefore, I must be able to take them off to return to life.”

My face was just as barren of glasses as it had been the thirty-odd other times I’d checked it.

“No,” I whimpered, remembering the storm and the zap of electricity that had knocked me out when I was in the process of logging in to the game. What if it had done something to me? What if it had somehow rearranged reality and sucked me into a world where the unreal became real?

“Aye, dearie, now ye understand,” Renata said, watching me from the mouth of the alley. I slumped dazedly against the wall, my knees threatening to give out under me. “Welcome to Turtle’s Back. I hope ye’ll be happy with us, since ye’ll be spendin’ the rest of yer life here.”

A black maelstrom swept up out of nowhere and claimed me, sucking me down into its inky depths, but before it wholly consumed me, my mind managed one last coherent thought.

I wasn’t going down without a fight.

—Ibid, Act II

I have always maintained that tears serve little purpose. They are a waste of energy, they are purposeless, they seldom serve to make you feel better as you might think they would, and they can leave you with red eyes and blotchy skin. Many has been the time I’ve counseled my emotional daughter that it would be better to channel the energy expended upon emotional outbursts into more proactive, positive actions.

The thought came to me, as I sat sobbing my eyes out in Renata’s house of ill repute, that there were times when I was extremely full of it.

“Ye feelin’ better now, dearie?” Renata asked as the sobs trickled to heavy sniffling, nose blowing, and the odd hiccup or two thrown in just to make things interesting.

“Yes, thank you; I think I’m past the worst of it. I’m mostly worried about my daughter. How is she going to cope with a vegetable for a mother?”

“Ye’re not still thinkin’ of throwin’ yerself off the dock?” the concerned woman asked.

I shook my head and made another swipe at my nose with the handkerchief she had provided. “No, I’m not suicidal anymore, although I think there’s merit in the idea of a near-death experience to bring my mind back. Because, you know, either I’ve gone insane, or the world has, and somehow I just think I could handle the insanity better if I knew it was something that psychotherapy and a really big dose of Prozac could fix. Finding myself a prisoner in something that doesn’t exist is—”

“There she goes again,” said the dark-haired Suky, hoisting the baby she had been nursing a bit higher on her hip. “Ye’ve set her off again, Reggie. Now we’ll have her waterin’ the rug afore all our Jacks.”

“She’s a blight, she is,” Mags, another of Renata’s women, complained as she primped before a tarnished bit of mirror set on the sideboard. “Can’t ye do somethin’ with her, then? Sittin’ there blubberin’ like a scalded cat like that, she’ll run off all our business.”

“Hush, ye heartless tart. Can’t ye see the poor thing is upset?” Sly Jez patted my shoulder sympathetically. I sniffled appreciatively at her. “She’s had a bad bit of news, she has. What is it, Amy—is yer trouble that yer man’s run off with another lass?”