The Free Lunch Read online

  Nearly at once it resolved again. Annie’s face was a few decimeters from his, taut with concern. “Don’t try to get up.”

  “Okay,” he said agreeably. He hadn’t realized he was down.

  He felt himself picked up and carried. He marveled at her strength: he was pretty sure he could not have carried someone his own size. She set him gently on what he could tell was a bed. He tried to toe his shoes off, but found it oddly hard to do.

  “I’ll get it,” she said, and did. “Sleep now. You can eat later.”

  “Okay,” he said again, and did as he was told.

  THE MOMENT OF awakening can be as hard to pin down as the instant love dies. Mike’s first conscious thought was that there was a spoon in his mouth. Investigating, he found his favorite food in all the universe—Captain Horatio’s clam chowder—at the business end of it, and Annie on the other. He swallowed. His belly told him it was at least his third or fourth spoonful of soup. It made him think of how Mom always said he would sleep through his own hanging, and that made him want to stop thinking, so he did, and ate soup.

  By the time the bowl was empty, he had become aware of his surroundings. His first reaction to Annie’s home was surprise—at how unsurprising it was. Heck, it was downright boring. It reminded him of a hotel room. (A cheap hotel room, the only kind he had ever seen except in TV or films.) No entertainment center—in fact, no visible TV or stereo of any kind. No posters, paintings, or pictures. No windows. Hardly any furniture at all, really, and all of that looked old and dinky. The computer was so old it had no speakers; looking closer he saw its disk drive would accept only Stone Age floppy disks, and its monitor could not be changed in either size or aspect ratio. The bed he lay on was antique, unpowered, simply a flat rectangle: he sat upright only with the aid of a precarious pyramid of pillows. The single visible recreational amenity was a pair of bookshelves packed full with books, mostly beat-up paperbacks. Something else nagged at his subconscious, and then surfaced: there was no remote control of any kind within reach of the bed…

  Then all at once it made sense. He asked himself two questions: Why did I have an HEC and posters and a good PC and a real bed in my room (when I still had all that stuff)? and Why do most people?—and the answer to both came back the same. So we won’t mind so much that we don’t live in Dreamworld.

  Annie didn’t need any of that stuff.

  Besides, she’d have to be prepared to abandon everything she owned, if Security ever got wind of her and she had to jungle up someplace else…so why own anything much?

  “You can go back to sleep again if you like,” she said, setting down the empty bowl. “It’s the middle of the night.” She wore a dark purple silk robe and slippers. He realized suddenly that he was naked under the covers, but could not manage to work up any embarrassment over it. He had been a patient before.

  He made himself take a deep breath. “H-how many of us are there?” he asked.

  She blinked. “Two. How many does it look like?”

  “I mean Under.”

  “The answer is still the same. We’re the whole club, boy. You and I are the only ones PWOL.”

  “Huh? I mean, beg pardon?”

  “Present Without Official Leave. Am I coming through? No one else is Under.”

  “Oh.”

  “Dozens have tried. Well, hundreds have tried, maybe thousands for all I know, but dozens have gotten as far as you have. As of today, nobody but me has been Under for as long as a week. The current record is four and a half days.”

  “Oh.” He felt sharp dismay.

  “I didn’t help any of them,” she said. “None of them even knew I was here.”

  He started to answer, but the longer he hesitated, the longer he hesitated. Annie must know his obvious next question; since she wasn’t going ahead and answering it, she must not want to. “What did he do wrong?” he asked finally.

  “Who? Oh, you mean the record holder.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He pissed me off.”

  From her the expression was startling. Then the meaning sank in.

  “You…I mean, you—”

  “Got him kicked out,” she agreed. “I locked a door behind him one day. He didn’t belong here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t look so worried.”

  He started to relax. “I belong here, then?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said impersonally. “But we’ve been introduced. If I ever decide you don’t belong, I’ll tell you first.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t look so worried, I said. Damn it, boy, you’ve gotten farther than almost anyone else in the history of Dreamworld: be content with that for now.”

  “Except for you,” he couldn’t help adding.

  She looked amused. “I am the history of Dreamworld.”

  “Have you ever—” He hesitated. “Do you ever go…you know, out?”

  “Never. And I don’t plan to.” There was flat finality in her voice. She got up and brought the empty bowl to the small sink at one end of the room, rinsed it, and set it aside to dry. “More soup here,” she said, pointing at the microwave. “Fridge there, pantry there, dunny over there behind that door. If you want anything, help yourself: I’m going to bed.” She came back to the bedside, and—to his astonishment—dropped her robe, climbed in beside him, and slid under the covers. “Don’t bother trying to explore; I’ve locked us in.”

  Mike rummaged through his entire social experience in search of an appropriate comment to make to an adult female stranger who has just joined one in bed, and came up empty. By the time he came up with “Good night” as a default choice, he was talking to himself.

  C H A P T E R 3

  SOAKING

  Rather to his surprise, he was asleep nearly at once.

  AND THEN, EVEN more quickly, he was awake again. Wide awake, instantly aware of who and where he was, motionless in bed, reaching out with all his senses for whatever it was that had wakened him. He couldn’t identify it. But neither could he escape the conviction that something was…well, not wrong exactly, Annie was sleeping soundly beside him, so probably nothing could be seriously wrong. But something was definitely…

  …different…

  …happening…

  Was there a sound in the air, behind or beneath the sound of Annie’s breathing? A kind of hum? The harder he tried to answer the question, the more uncertain he became. Was there some unfamiliar smell in the room? Again he was unsure. Was…whatever it was…coming more from one direction than another? Impossible to say.

  The more negative reports came in from his senses, the more convinced he became that something was happening, somewhere.

  He knew the sensible thing was to roll over and go back to sleep. Even if he could figure out what was going on, and even if he concluded something needed to be done about it, he wouldn’t be able to do it. His hostess-mentor, whom he did not want to piss off, was asleep next to him. He was exhausted himself and sensed he had a big day ahead of him tomorrow.

  Heart pounding, he slipped from the bed, so stealthily that Annie’s breathing never changed. He had no idea what kind of signal he was picking up, but perhaps if he moved his detectors around, he could triangulate on the thing. He paused for a moment, closed his eyes, and set out across the dark room.

  The nameless event did seem to change in some way as he moved. But it did so almost at random, so that the information he gained still refused to collapse into any kind of useful pattern. He changed direction a couple of times to no avail.

  “Your diet must be about fifty-fifty, carrots and locoweed,” Annie said softly.

  He froze.

  “I can’t figure out what in the name of God’s labia majora you think you’re doing…but I’m impressed by how well you’re doing it in the dark. You must have eyes like a cat.”

  “Actually, I’ve got my eyes closed,” he said. “I looked around before when the light was on.”

  “You look around a
room once, and you can navigate it in pitch dark?”

  “Uh…I mean, well, yeah. I guess. Sorry I woke you.”

  “What the hell were you doing, practicing square dance?”

  “I…well, I…I thought I heard something. Or something.”

  “Oh.” She sat up. “I see. Interesting. I think I’m starting to understand.”

  “What?”

  “Why I picked you.”

  “Picked me for what?”

  “To be my friend.”

  He was startled speechless.

  “You’re sensitive to the place,” she said. “I must have known it somehow. Thank God—I was beginning to think I was nuts.” She got up from the bed; he heard her start to get dressed. “Throw your pants on,” she said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  He closed his eyes and retraced his steps. His clothes were folded and stacked on a night table on his side of the bed; he was ready before Annie had finished strapping her Command Band on her wrist and beeping the door lock open.

  She did not bother to turn on a light, since neither of them needed one. He followed the whisper of her clothes through the dark.

  He had expected light in the corridor, but had assumed for some reason that it would be damped down to night level. It was daytime bright. He ducked and flinched…then hurried after her, blinking furiously.

  Shortly they came to a service elevator. He made a mark on the map he had been making in his head on the way…and, without thinking about it, also created and stored a mirror-reversed copy of that map, so that if something went wrong and they had to come back out of that elevator at a dead run, he wouldn’t have to waste half a second doing it then. Annie consulted the Command Band on her wrist, put her ear to the elevator door, and only then pushed the button; he filed that, too. The car arrived quickly, and he followed her in.

  “Elevator, top level,” she told it. “Lights out.”

  The car darkened, and they went up—slowly at first, but soon fast. Just as he began fumbling around for a handhold he realized he didn’t need it anymore: they were there.

  The moment the door opened, he knew where they were: the uppermost reach of Johnny’s Tree. Its magic was not functioning at the moment—he could still see Annie, for instance, and the nets that caught you if you fell were also visible now, or nearly, gleaming translucently in the moonlight. But the spot was unmistakable. All of Strawberry Fields was laid out thirty or forty meters below them. In the distance you could make out the Bridge of Birds, and beyond that a little of Rogero’s Castle, the Hippogriff asleep atop it now. It was one of Mike’s favorite vantage points in Dreamworld—and only partly because during the day it conferred invisibility on all who came here. (“No one—I think—is in my tree,” Johnny had said in the song for which this part of Dreamworld was named.)

  Annie paused before leaving the elevator, so he did, too. He assumed she was scanning for possible observers, either up here or down on the ground, with her eyes or ears or, for all he knew, nose. But he was wrong.

  “I’m rushing this,” she said. “Elevator, hold.”

  She sounded irritated. He looked closer, squinting in the poor light, and she looked irritated, too. “What’s the matter?”

  She hesitated. “Do you believe in magic?” she asked suddenly.

  He blinked. “Of course.”

  She looked even more annoyed. “Let me try again. Do you believe the magic in Dreamworld is real, capital M magic? Or is it stage magic? Do you even understand the difference?”

  “Of course I do. Jesus, Annie, I’m not a little kid.”

  She seemed less annoyed. “Then answer me. Is this place infested with genuine fairies and unicorns—or do they do it with mirrors?”

  Mike took a long time answering. This was not a trivial question. In a sense, he was being asked whether he Believed in Dreamworld. A thousand movies and TV shows and books and comics urged him to punch his fist in the air and shout yes in reflex response—to dutifully support the myth, in the same way that grown-ups would not publicly admit to the nonexistence of Santa Claus. If this had been daytime, and there had existed even the remote possibility that another child or even grown-up might be within earshot, he would have followed that instinct unhesitatingly.

  But this was not daytime, and they were not in public. The question had been privately asked. He sensed somehow that Annie wanted the most honest answer he could give. All right, then: what answer was that? More time ticked by. She waited, her face impassive.

  “It’s faked,” he said at last.

  She nodded solemnly.

  “That’s okay, though,” he said. “I mean…well, it’s not really fake, exactly, not like cheating. They’d use real magic if they could. They want there to be real magic, lots of it—so they make some, and give it to us, so we can carry a little bit home with us to help us recognize it.” He felt himself running on, and stopped. “I mean, they’re not cheats.”

  “Relax, I know what you mean. So you understand it’s all basically a magic act? Tricks and gimmicks?”

  “The best ones on earth,” he said.

  “Did you ever go backstage and ask a magician how a trick worked?”

  He nodded.

  “Did he tell you?”

  He nodded again.

  “Okay, here’s the important part. How did you feel, once you knew? I mean, did it spoil the trick, knowing how he did it?”

  The question seemed so odd he dug out the memory involved and replayed it, just to be sure. “No,” he said. “Not at all. It was more fun knowing how. I mean, it was even more amazing, that he could do something magical like that without magic.”

  She relaxed. “Good.”

  “Annie, what are you asking me all this weird stuff for?”

  She sighed. “Because it finally dawned on me that I can’t keep you Under for any length of time without teaching you the secrets of Dreamworld. Most of ’em, anyway. And a lot of people…well, no matter how much they think they want to know how the magic is done, deep down inside they’d really rather not know. I didn’t want to be responsible for spoiling Dreamworld for you.”

  He thought that over. “Well…thanks. But I don’t think there’s anything I’d rather not know.” He frowned. “I hate not knowing stuff.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You are a rare one. Let’s go, then.”

  They left the elevator. Everything was at once familiar and weirdly unfamiliar. He had been here at least a dozen times in daylight. It was strange and mildly thrilling to be here at night. The insubstantial sensation of Something Happening was back in force, intensified almost to the point of making sense.

  He realized that in his previous visits, he had never noticed a second elevator. He glanced over his shoulder, and failed to find it. “How do I get back into that elevator if I need to?” he asked.

  “You follow me. If I’m not around, you’re SOL.” She saw he did not know the idiom. “Let’s just say you’re ‘Gully Low.’ Don’t worry about it, we’ll get you a Command Band of your own tomorrow. Take a seat.”

  She had led them to a “crotch” in Johnny’s Tree that happened to be his particular favorite, since it gave the best view of Penny Lane. Beneath them, the Tree—powered down or not—silently extruded gossamer safety nets. They sat together, side by side.

  He gazed around at Strawberry Fields below, only half seeing it. It was all true. He was really, finally backstage, after hours. Thirty meters up in the air, he was Under. All Dreamworld was his.

  The night was electric. It was too dark to make out much of the meadow below, in moonlight; he lifted his gaze, up past Penny Lane…to the forest that blocked off sight of the rest of Dreamworld, save for the distant arch of the Bridge of Birds…and then higher, to the night sky…

  His gaze insisted on yanking itself back downward again.

  There was something strange about Penny Lane. It was…

  …holy shit, it was shimmering. Vibrating just perceptibly in the darkness. Not all of it, bu
t most of it. He seemed to see a…a droplet of some kind fall from the Pretty Nurse’s poppy tray to the sidewalk…and then another.

  He leaned out as far as the barrier would let him, looked straight down at the meadow beneath his branch, and squinted hard. A scrap of cloud drifted away from the moon to help, and he cried out in spite of himself.

  Strawberry Fields was crawling…

  ALL OF DREAMWORLD was crawling.

  He marinated in horror for perhaps ten seconds of objective time. Is that less than a million years? Afterward, maybe. Then Annie pulled him back up into the tree crotch, squinted at his face, cursed, and slapped him hard.

  It was like a cold reboot of his brain. This computer may not have been shut down properly the last time it was used; you should always shut down using the Power key. Next time I will, I promise. Now what was it that made us crash, again? Oh! Something to get hung about, indeed…

  Annie was shaking him. “How old were you when you saw it?” she was saying.

  Her question might have been obscure to another, but he understood it without thought and answered at once, “Eight.”

  “Shit,” she said, with feeling. Then: “An animal? Or—”

  “A cat. My cat, Smoky. I found him two days after.”

  She clenched her jaw and nodded. “I should have thought. I’m sorry Mike, look at me. Stop trying to look over the side and look me in the eye.” He did as he was told. “Listen hard. There is nothing dead down there. There is nothing ugly down there. Nothing creepy. I promise. What is down there is good. It’s magic, but it’s white magic. It’s part of what makes Dreamworld possible. Do you understand?” She saw his expression, and with an effort made herself speak softer and more slowly. “Let me try again. Have you ever loved somebody, Mike? I mean, really loved them?”

  He thought hard. “Smoky.”

  She seemed to wince for some reason, but pressed on. “Okay. Did you ever see Smoky shit? While there wasn’t anyone else around to see you look?”

  He was startled into paying closer attention. She asked the oddest questions. “Sure.”