Full Tilt Part 13

"Stop now," she said, "and you can share it with me."

"Share what?"

"Everything. All the rides and any other ride you can imagine."

"As your slave."

"No, as my equal."

I realized that she was not just holding me, I was holding her as well. Why? If I felt such fury and such revulsion at what she was, why did I hold her? Was it just her beauty that captivated me, or something more?

"This place has always been out of balance," she said. "It was all that I knew. Now I want to experience the balance you bring."

Suddenly the slave rags I wore began to shimmer like gold. Jewels grew in the fabric, and I found myself clad in a robe of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.

"You could be the G.o.d Osiris over a new, better Egypt," she told me. "You could build any world you desire, be its king or its subject; you could experience thrills or tranquility and move freely from one ride to another, just as I do." She ran her hands down the length of my jewel-covered arms, then clasped my hands in hers. "I am the park's soul. I want you to be its mind."

Was she sincere, or was it just another trick? I'd become aware enough to see through her deceptions, and this offer felt real. I had brought her something she never had. I was the only one who ever had.

I tore myself away from her eyes long enough to look at Russ and Maggie, laboring across the chasm. "What about them? What about my brother? Will you let them go?"

"I can't do that. But if you stay here, we'll create rides for each of them. They can have whatever they want, whatever they need, forever and ever."

Could that be possible? Would she really put that kind of power in my hands? I imagined the rides I might design for my friends. For Maggie I'd build a palace of mirrors that told all the truths about herself that were worth telling. How she was kind, generous, compa.s.sionate, and, yes, beautiful. Maybe a log flume for Russ! Not a slow, dull one, but one where he could ride down the rapids of an endless river, camping every night at its bank. And for my brother, perhaps a parachute jump that air-dropped food to a starving people. It would open him up to the thrill found in giving, rather than taking.

"Think about it, Blake. This place could be different with you here."

The more I thought about Ca.s.sandra's offer, the more appealing it got. I tried to weigh my alternatives against each other. If I took one more ride and survived it, I'd win my freedom. But if I ended my journey here, I'd win the park. A master of worlds . . . it was a dizzying thought. It wasn't the power, but the peace that appealed to me-the peace of truly being in control at last. She was right: The park would be different with me sharing the power. And she would be different if we weren't cast as enemies.

"The larger the park grows, the more real it becomes," she said. "In time your world will become the false one, and all these worlds will be real. Come build them with me."

It was there that the bubble burst.

"Build them how? Build them on the spirits of others you'll trap here?"

She answered me with no shame or remorse. "Nothing comes without a price, and no one comes who doesn't choose to be here."

I looked around me once more. So many were trapped here-not just the ones in The Works, but those forced to playact in the worlds of each ride. All for her amus.e.m.e.nt. If I took my place with Ca.s.sandra here, it would be for my amus.e.m.e.nt as well. I suppose we can all be accused of using people in our lives, but I could never use people the way she did.

"I've given you your first real challenge," I told her, "and now you know what it means to be afraid. But there's something else you still need to experience."

"And what's that?"

"You need to lose."

I reached back, grasping firmly on to the largest wheel, which looked eerily like a giant Ferris wheel. As it turned it tore me out of her arms, lifting me up and up.

I heard her scream in anger, but in a moment her voice disappeared into the grinding of The Works, and she was hidden by the billowing plumes of steam.

As the wheel took me higher the jewels on my robe dropped away and disappeared into the gear-work. Would I have been a decent "G.o.d"? Perhaps. At least I'd like to think so. But the cost of accepting the job was too great.

Now my clothes were just rags again as I rode the wheel to the uppermost level of The Works. There, the machinery gave way to a fissure, still streaming sand from Egypt up above. I jumped from the wheel to the jagged rocks, sliding and scrambling for a foothold, kicking rocks down into the depths, until I finally had a grip and stopped sliding. Then I shoved my fingertips and toes into cracks in the stone, pulling my way up. I wasn't much of a rock climber, but I was learning fast.

Quinn saw me the second I came up through the mist. He must have been waiting there all this time. He never lost hope in me. He reached down and helped me out.

"I thought it was over," he said. "I thought you were gone for sure!"

"And miss the next ride?" I looked toward the top of the Great Pyramid where the ride symbol glowed. It reminded me that I hadn't kept my soul, not yet. Refusing Ca.s.sandra's deal bought me nothing if I didn't get to the next ride, and getting there wouldn't be easy. The pyramid stones we had to climb were like six-foot-high steps, and there were dozens of them.

"We'll help each other up each step," I told Quinn. "First you, then me." I gave Quinn a boost up to the next ledge.

We climbed one immense stone after another. Above us the blue sky melted away. Below us the voices of the crowd that had gathered to cheer us became fainter and more distant. Finally we reached the illuminatus, the golden tip of the pyramid. The ride symbol glowed a searing white, matching the glowing brand on the backs of our hands. The spiral of the symbol spanned ten feet, and in the very center of the symbol, where the wave intersected the spiral, was a b.u.t.ton about the size of my hand. I slammed my palm down on the b.u.t.ton, forcing it in until a mechanism clicked. Somewhere deep down in The Works, a new gear engaged.

Nothing happened at first. Everything seemed to hang in silence, waiting. Then something began to move. I heard the sc.r.a.ping of stone against stone, and just beneath the golden tip of the pyramid a row of panels fell away. Thick iron spokes extended outward just below us, and the entire tip of the pyramid began to rotate.

"Hold on!" I yelled to Quinn. There wasn't much to hold on to, but we clung to the face of the golden illuminatus as it gained speed, rotating faster and faster.

Eight iron spokes had grown from beneath the pyramid tip, like the eight legs of a spider. From the end of each spoke a pair of pods appeared that revolved around each other. It was the Tilt-A-Whirl I'd seen when I first entered the park. The little pairs of pods spun and dipped, weaving in and out of one another like the blades of an eggbeater.

"We have to get into one of those pods!" I shouted over the thrumming of the ride.

"They're too far away!" Quinn shouted back. "We'll never make it!"

"Who hung fifty feet over Six Flags to get his stupid hat? Come on!" I pulled him off the golden face of the pyramid tip, and we dropped onto a black iron arm of the spinning ride.

We had to get to the end of the arm and drop into one of the spinning pods. But as we shimmied farther out on the stem, centrifugal force threatened to hurl us off. I turned around and eased my way toward the end of the spoke feet first, hugging the cold metal as tightly as I could. Quinn did the same, and we inched our way out, the world spinning madly around us. The desert was a blur below us. There was nothing else in the world now but me, Quinn, and the ride.

I felt the pulses of wind from the two spinning pods at the end of the spoke and heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as they beat past, sounding like the blades of a propeller. They chased each other in circles, hanging beneath the arm to which we clung.

Now the ride wasn't just spinning, it was wobbling as well, like an off-balance top, making me feel drunk and giddy.

Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.

The only way to make it into one of the pods below was to jump. If we jumped a second too late, we'd fall to our deaths. If we jumped a second too soon, we'd be hit by a pod and squashed like bugs on a windshield.

Timing was everything. I tried to match my breathing to the spinning of the pods, locking my vision in one place, ignoring the vertigo, and concentrating on the jump.

Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.

"We're gonna die!" wailed Quinn. "Oh, G.o.d, we're gonna die!"

"Shut up! You sound like me!"

Even as I overcame my fears, terror had attacked Quinn with a vengeance. It was so foreign to him that he didn't know how to control it. It practically paralyzed him. I knew I'd have to jump first, then talk him down. I took one more moment to estimate the length of the fall. I'd only get one shot at this.

I jumped and instantly panicked. I was falling too far. I had missed. . . . But then my view of the pyramid base below was eclipsed by the pod, and I landed inside.

Up above, Quinn still clung to the arm of the ride, his cheek firmly pressed against the cold steel like a gecko clinging to a branch.

"Jump!"

"It's too fast!"

"Just jump!"

"I'll fall!"

"You can make it!"

He locked his eyes on the spinning pod, let loose a battle cry, and sprang from the arm of the ride. He missed the pod. His body slid down its slick black hull, but his arm caught the edge like a hanger hook. I grabbed him by his arm, but I lost my grip. Then I got a grip on his hair, holding it just long enough to grab his shirt with my other hand. It began to tear, but by then I had hooked a finger in a loop on the back of his jeans. He grabbed the edge of the pod and finally flipped himself in.

"Are we done?" he asked. "Can we go home now?"

Now that we were inside the pod, it began to change, as I knew it would. I felt the fracturing of metal as our pod tore free from the ride, but we didn't fall. We soared. The nose of the pod elongated. A dome grew over our heads, and the cabin expanded. An instrument panel sprang out in front of us as our little bench divided, becoming two separate seats, molded to fit the contours of our bodies. The instrument panel looked nothing like that of the j.a.panese Zero. The entire thing was a computer screen filled with holographic b.u.t.tons and gauges that all seemed to be labeled in some language like Pig Klingon.

"I know this!" said Quinn. "This is the s.p.a.ceship on the cover of a CD I have-Nuclear Galaxy's Greatest Hits!"

"Great. How do you fly it?"

"I don't know. All I know is that there's also a picture of the ship blowing up on the back cover."

I looked up from the strange control panel to the view-port that stretched not only in front of us, but over our heads as well, giving us a 360-degree view. The sky was dark violet, sparking with electricity; and there were clouds, although they really didn't look like clouds. They looked more like tangled, leathery tree limbs, stretching in an endless purple web all around us. Electrical impulses shot along the knotted, ropelike clouds into the violet distance.

"It looks like a nebula," I told Quinn. "A s.p.a.ce cloud."

He looked at me sharply. "I know what a nebula is." Then he saw something that shut his att.i.tude down cold. "Bad news!"

I stared ahead. A ma.s.sive object was hurtling directly at us. It was a moment before I recognized what it was.

"If we're in s.p.a.ce," asked Quinn, "what's that doing here?"

"I have no idea."

14.

Brain-Jam There's a travel poster of Italy in my room at home, right over my bed. You don't have to see it to know what's on it. There's the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and that pink place in Venice with all the pigeons-you'd know it if you saw it. Like I've said, I've always dreamed of going to those places and seeing all those things . . . but I never expected to see the Tower of Pisa spinning end over end like a giant tomahawk, heading straight for me.

"Do something!" shouted Quinn.

I looked down at the s.p.a.ceship's complex computer interface. No mouse, no keypad. I didn't know what to do, but the second I moved my hand close to the interface, a steering column grew up from the screen, into my hand.

"Cool," said Quinn, more relieved than impressed.

My fingers clasped the control stick, and I pulled to the right. An engine fired, and our little s.p.a.ce pod veered right, narrowly missing the tumbling stone tower. Now, with the tower gone, I could see that the s.p.a.ce around us was more than just a nebula. It was a debris field-but this was not exactly your typical s.p.a.ce debris. As we shot forward, unable to slow down, the Eiffel Tower tumbled by, cutting diagonally across our path, its movement eerily graceful. Easter Island heads floated by, their mysterious faces seeming to grin mockingly in the strange lavender light.

I looked beyond the debris to the purple nebula around us. Something struck me about the way the electrical impulses shot down the web of snaking, intertwining ropes. It was familiar .. . like something I'd learned in biology. . . .

And suddenly I knew what this place was supposed to be.

"I don't think we're in s.p.a.ce," I told Quinn.

"Then where are we?"

I sighed. "We're . . . inside my head."

"Oh." Quinn didn't look surprised. "Why do you have all this c.r.a.p floating around in your head?"

"If I knew, it wouldn't be there." I was sure if we ricocheted around long enough, we'd find every thought I'd ever had, trans.m.u.ted into rock-solid form. Mental toe-jam. This place was what Ca.s.sandra saw when she looked at me.

I go places sometimes.

Yeah, well, I never thought I'd find myself here.

"I saw this movie once," Quinn said. "A bunch of scientists got shrunk and injected into a guy's blood. They had to crawl out over his eyeball."

"I don't think it'll be that easy."

A farmhouse tumbled past, colored in sepia tones. A young girl who looked suspiciously like Judy Garland peered out of the window, astonished.

I turned to Quinn. "If you say, 'I don't think we're in Kansas anymore,' I'll smack you."

"Watch out!"

I pulled up, but not fast enough, and we were clipped by Big Ben-the clock that usually chimes out over London but was now revolving in front of us like a pinwheel. The impact sent us spinning, knocking Quinn out of his chair. He bounced weightlessly around the cabin. What bothered me even more than being hit, though, was what I saw on Big Ben's ma.s.sive clock face. Its hands read ten minutes to six. Ten minutes to dawn. Ten minutes to beat this ride, or it was all over.

I pushed and tugged on the control stick, which fired retros and boosters until I'd straightened us out. I had no idea what direction we faced, but then, every direction was the same in this place. There was no up or down, no left or right.

"Can't you drive safe?" Quinn pulled himself back down into his seat and struggled with a seat-belt harness that looked like it was meant for a creature with three arms.

We smashed into a grafitti-covered subway car, but it sustained most of the damage from the collision, spinning away from us to reveal another s.p.a.ceship behind it, which jetted out like a cop car at a speed trap. It was sleek and bronze, with curves that were almost feminine, and it took off after us, shooting some sort of multicolored laser weapon. My brain didn't have to fire too many synaptic sparks to figure out who piloted that ship.

The blast tore a hole in our left wing-a hole that sizzled with every color of the spectrum.

"It's an Aurora-Refractive Laser Cannon," said Quinn. "Straight out of my Steroid Avenger comic books."

Ca.s.sandra didn't try to contact us. I suppose she had nothing left to say to me beyond the constant blasts from her weapon. Another blast caught our right flank, jolting us badly, but we held together.

"Check the controls," I told Quinn. "If she has an Aurora-Refractive whatever, then maybe we have one too!"

He scanned the unreadable control panel, then did a quick eenie-meenie-meinie-mo and touched one of the virtual b.u.t.tons.