robert Charrette - Arthur 02 - A King Beneath the Mountain (23 page)

"He needs your help, John Reddy," Kranekin said.

"You mean
you
need my help."

Kranekin shrugged his massive shoulders, a motion that barely disturbed the flow of his hair and beard. "In this, it is the same thing. We are trying to help him."

"For your own ends."

"We have our concerns," the boss dwarf acknowledged. "However, in this matter we are obliged to do what we can to see him well."

"See him well? He wouldn't be like this if you hadn't messed with his mind."

"We acted with his consent and took all reasonable precautions. It remains unclear whether his condition is any fault of ours," Kranekin said gruffly.

"However, we did introduce him to the technology," Wilson said. "We understand our obligation and are acting to fulfill it, which is why we brought you here. Are you willing to help him?"

"Why? So you can control him?"

"He is of no use to anyone, including himself, like this. He would not abandon you in similar circumstances."

John wasn't so sure. Bear was fully capable of dumping people. He'd been ready to abandon Trashcan Harry when he and John had been in Mitsutomo's clutches. Of course, Bear had known that Harry was a goblin and had no use for him; he'd come to get John. In those days, John had enjoyed a somewhat dubious status as a
comes
, one of Bear's close companions, but that had been before Bear had learned of John's parentage.

Would he abandon John? Once John would have agreed with the dwarf and said no. But now? The last time he and Hear had seen each other, Bear had called John a traitor. Not a goodwill and boon companionship sort of attitude.

But John remembered other words as well, friendlier words. That was the Bear John preferred to remember. He looked at the tank and felt a little sick himself. The man in the tank didn't look like either of the Bears he remembered. Who could say how this man would see him? Where did these dwarves get off in making predictions about Bear's attitude?

"How do you know what he'd do?"

Kranekin took a moment before answering. "We have some experience of him."

What was that supposed to mean? This Kranekin looked as old as a fossil. Could it be—"You mean you knew him before, um, like, when he was king?"

Nodding solemnly, Kranekin said, "We knew Artos the king."

We? Was that the royal we?
"You
knew him
personally?"

"Our history is not the question here. You are the question." Kranekin pointed at the tank. "Are you willing to help him?"

John stared at the frail figure floating in the tank. Unable to help himself, he had to ask, "How dangerous is it?"

Wilson surprised him. "For you or for him?"

John surprised himself by feeling as fearful for Bear's future as for his own. These dwarves were responsible for Bear's condition. What if Bear got worse? What if John ended up like that?

"For both of us."

"You will be in no danger," Kranekin assured him.

"What about Bear?"

"He can only be better off."

Some people said that being dead was better than being sick. John wasn't sure he believed that, though. Could he help Bear? God knew he needed help.

"Are you willing to try?" Kranekin asked.

John swallowed hard. "Yeah, I guess."

"Are you ready to try?"

"You mean here and now?"

"You got someplace else to be?" Wilson asked.

The sudden rush made John suspicious. "You haven't given me a lot of reason to trust you guys."

Wilson nodded. "For your own safety, in case you declined to help."

"You mean like, so I won't know much if you let me go?"

Kranekin nodded.

"You'd actually let me go?"

"Sure," said Wilson. "Why not?"

"Spillway Sue, too?"

"Again, why not? She's seen less than you have."

"I wish I could believe you."

"You can," Kranekin said. "You can go; you need only turn your back on Artos."

John didn't like the way the boss dwarf put it. Sure, he knew the price of leaving, but what was the price of staying and helping? The dwarves said it would be safe. They said

Bear needed him. But was any of it true? They'd used a lie to get him here. Were they lying now?

"What if I say that I want to go? What happens to Bear? What are you going to do to him?"

"You are not the only option," said Kranekin. "Perhaps not even the best."

"Most of our doctors favor a different course of treatment anyway," Wilson observed. "A radical course."

Pointing to the tank, Kranekin said, "You are wasting
his
time, Reddy. Possibly you are wasting his life."

Laying guilt wasn't the way to get John to agree to go along.
He
wasn't the one who'd gotten Bear screwed up. Let them fix their own mess. Why should he help them? They'd never done anything for him.

Still, John's eyes kept drifting back to the tank. Bear looked so helpless, so . . . what? John wasn't sure, but he knew something in him ached, seeing Bear this way. But what could he do? He wasn't a doc or a psych; he didn't have a degree in anything, let alone anything useful. He wasn't much of anything.

Bear had come for John when Mitsutomo kidnapped him. John had been Bear's
comes.
When Bear had made the offer, John had been thrilled. For a time John had considered himself squire to the greatest knight in the world, a knight who was a little tarnished and a lot outdated, but a knight nonetheless. It had been a dream come true. Sort of. Didn't he owe something to Bear? What if there was something he could do to help?

He'd given Caliburn back to Bear and saved Bear's life. And Bear hadn't even said thank-you. Hadn't that repaid Bear for his rescue of John? More than repaid him for the baseless accusation of treachery. He and Bear were quits, weren't they?

Staring at Bear's shrunken figure, John knew they weren't finished. Bear's accusation of treachery
had
been baseless. John had resented it, not just because there were no grounds for it, but because Bear had jumped to conclusions. Bear had believed John had betrayed him just because of
what
John was, not
who
he was. John wanted to show Bear just how wrong he was. But there had been no chance. Well, here was a chance.

A chance that, even if successful, might put both of them in more trouble than they'd been in before. He only had the dwarves' word that they wanted to help and that they were Bear's friends. They certainly didn't act like friends. But if John didn't cooperate with them, they would do something else to Bear. Maybe something worse. Knowing he would probably regret it, he asked, "What do you want me to do?"

Kranekin nodded brusquely and made some kind of signal with his hand. A moment later, a door that John hadn't noticed before opened and admitted a trio of dwarves wearing white lab coats that almost brushed along the floor. Their beards were close-cropped like Wilson's, but they were built more like Kranekin, almost as wide as they were tall and with big, solid guts; despite their conventional clothing and hairstyles, they would have stood out on the street as nonhuman.

One of the whitecoats carried a boxy helmet in one hand. John could see chips and wires embedded in the clear plastic surface of the lumpy thing. A pivot on either temple held a transparent half mask that would cover the wearer's eyes and nose. Kranekin took it and held it out to John.

"It is inelegant but functional," said the boss dwarf. He sounded a little embarrassed.

Inelegant? It was ugly. "Well it's not going to make the
Fashion Forward
list. What is it?"

Wilson answered him. "An interface device. It's your ticket to the virtual environment we've got set up."

Virtuality headgear? John hadn't seen anything like it at the mall; there it was all slick and rugged goggles and gloves and cockpits. While the idea of playing with some fancy virtual environment was exciting, the circumstances were something less than he'd have liked. At the very least, he wanted to know what sort of place they were going to toss his mind into. "What kind of environment are you taking about?"

"One familiar to him, at first. We need to reestablish his past before we work on his present."

And what about his future?
John didn't think he ought to ask; he was a little afraid of the answer he might get. Was he going to be helping Bear, or just setting him up for Kranekin and his people? He took the helmet in his hands.

"Sit down first," Wilson suggested.

"Where?"

The dwarf pointed behind John. There was a padded chair that looked as if it had escaped from a passenger airliner. Where had
that
come from? It hadn't been there when they entered the room. Wilson smirked as John eyed the chair suspiciously.

"It's not magic," the dwarf said.

And John believed him. He wasn't sure why, but he did. But if not by magic, how had the chair appeared?

"Just a sufficiently advanced technology," Wilson said in answer to the unasked question.

Like the doors, he supposed. They appeared in seemingly solid walls. The chair must have come up through an opening in the floor. John looked for a crack in the floor and couldn't find one. He hadn't seen any sign of a door before the white-coats had entered either, but it had to have been there; even with their "sufficiently advanced technology," it seemed unlikely that the dwarves were manufacturing an aperture anytime they needed one. Most likely they just had a very good camouflaging gimmick. Holographic screening, maybe? Whatever the system was, Mitsutomo or one of the other megacorps could make a fortune marketing it.

"Put the helmet on and sit."

John did as he was told. The whitecoats busied themselves with something on the back of the chair. After several minutes one of them said, "Ready."

Another stepped around into John's view and said-, "Close your eyes."

John did so.

"Open them."

For a moment John thought he was back in one of the forests of the otherworld. But only for a moment. It was different here; and at first John wasn't sure how he knew that. Then he listened. There were none of the strange sounds and the soft stirrings he had felt, as much as heard, while traveling in that other realm. This forest, for all its multitude of trees and plants, its flitting small animals and birds, was dead. Or rather, it had never been alive. It was a virtual forest, a computer representation of a landscape. John wondered how far it extended. Was it manufactured anew as he changed his line of sight, or were all the individual trees stored in discrete locations? Were the forest creatures random or did they run on their own programs, living virtual lives in the virtual forest? Did the little animals reproduce virtually, or did they just go into reruns? However this virtual world worked, it was light-years ahead of the best he'd seen in the malls. It was just sight and sound there; here he could smell the leaf mold and feel the breeze against his skin; that was Senzaround™ stuff like in a theater.

He realized he was standing. He had no memory of getting out of the chair. Try as he might, he was unable to feel any sensation of his meat body sitting in the chair. Even better than Senzaround.

He held a hand up. His, all right. Down to the scar by his third knuckle that he'd gotten when he'd been three and tried to punch out a bad guy on the vid set. He looked down at his body. The shape was familiar, but the clothes weren't. He appeared to be wearing a baggy tunic, belted at the waist, and sandals, an outfit out of a medieval costume drama, and one of the better ones too; it looked like real clothes. He even had a sword strapped to his side. Surprisingly, the outfit felt comfortable, all broken in and livable like an old T-shirt and jeans. Even the weight of the sword on his hip felt comfortable. His old classmate Will Brenner would have been green with envy. Or maybe Will wouldn't be; he hadn't ever had much interest in virtually, preferring his anachronisms to be physical.

At the very least, Will would have gotten a thrill out of having a sword belted on; Will had never been able to afford one. Thinking about the sword, John couldn't resist. He took hold of the hilt and drew the blade. It was long, almost a meter, and the balance was a little awkward. The blade was double-edged and had a somewhat rounded point. Not much good for thrusting; the sword was definitely tip heavy. The ridged grip reminded him of something; the familiarity nagged at him.

When he saw the eagle cast into the crosspiece, things seemed to click into place. The sword was a Roman cavalry sword, a spatha-, John had seen one at a traveling exhibition in the Woodman Armory Museum. This weapon looked just like that one.

He swung it a couple of times, just to get the feel of it. It moved as he imagined it might. It was not the sort of sword he preferred, but it would serve a horseman well. He imagined riding hard, charging toward a foeman, blade upraised. Then—

Then he put it away. He wasn't a horseman and he wasn't charging anybody. Wandering about with your sword out was what heroes in bad fantasy books did. Walking around with a drawn sword was a good way to get yourself shot or skewered by people who might otherwise be friendly. Although he supposed he really didn't have to worry about things like that; the dwarves were controlling this simulation, and they weren't expecting him to fight anybody.