NETFEED/NEWS: Chargeheads Getting "In the Mood"

(visual: VNS outpatients waiting for module adjustment)

VO: Vagal Nerve Stimulation, or VNS, an artificial mood-altering process prescribed by some doctors as a cure for charge addiction, may itself become another form of addictive behavior,

(visual: Dr. Karina Kawande, inset)

KAWANDE: "It was inevitable, really. Stimulating the vagus nerve to relieve stress is an acceptable substitute for dangerous street-gear only when the pulse dosage can be controlled. But any device based on code can be hacked, and there are patients now who have their VNS pulsing twenty-four hours a day. . . ."

As they walked through the crowd, face after strange face slid past Sam Fredericks like some endless nightmare—dogs, bears, opal-eyed snakes, children with wings and birds' heads, boys and girls made from wood or gingerbread or even glass. But of the thousands of creatures that surrounded the Well and its roiling lights, an entire refugee camp beneath the endless twilit skies, not a single one was familiar.

Not a single one was Renie Sulaweyo.

Sam could barely stand to look at !Xabbu, who she knew must be even more disappointed than she was. When they had left Azador with his rediscovered Gypsy family, !Xabbu had set out almost at a run to begin the search for Renie, but as the day had worn by without any sign of her the small man's steps had become slower and slower. In all their journeying, even in the most desperate of times, she could scarcely remember him looking tired. Now he moved as though almost too weary to breathe.

"We should go back now." Sam took his arm. She felt his resistance but kept her grip. "We can look some more later."

His face, when he turned to her, was hollow-eyed, devastated. "She is not here, Sam. Not anywhere. And if this is the last place in this world. . . ."

She did not want to think about it, and she did not want !Xabbu thinking about it either. "No, we don't really know how this scanny place works. And we might have missed her, anyway—I'm getting so tired my eyes are blurring."

He sighed. "It is terrible of me to drag you on like this, Sam. We will go back and rest for a while with Azador's people."

"Chizz. Do you remember where they are?" She looked around at the ring of featureless hills. "I'm lost." Sam felt a little guilty—she had appealed to his protective instincts on purpose—but knew it was for his own good. It was funny how much !Xabbu was like Orlando, she thought. You couldn't get either of them to do much for themselves, but they would throw themselves off a building for a friend.

Orlando even got himself killed for me. . . . It was not a good thought and she pushed it away.

Making their way back through the aimless, uneasy throng seemed to take hours. Some of the other refugees had also worked hard to locate their own lost fellows—tiny exile communities from places with names like Where The Beans Talk and Cobbler's Bench had been pointed out to Sam and !Xabbu by helpful folk—but many more seemed to have simply walked as close to the Well as they could get, then stopped.

Azador's Gypsy kin had either arrived early or had staked their claim more aggressively than most. Their camp was close to the edge of the Well, the painted wagons clustered at the bottom of a bluff, as though a group of day-trippers had decided to picnic on the edge of an immense bomb crater—but no bomb crater had ever looked like this. When Sam had first seen it, she had thought that the black waters reflected the unchanging evening sky overhead and its sprinkling of faint stars. As they had drawn closer, all of them quiet and withdrawn except Azador, all troubled by their experiences crossing the covered bridge, she had discovered that the Well was a mirror of a very different kind. The stars, or whatever unstable points of light moved in its dark depths, were not static like those in the sky: they flared and died, as inconstant as foxfire. Sometimes an even greater light bloomed far below, so that for a moment all the well was full of a ruddy glow, as though a supernova had been born in the deepest expanses. Other times the points of brilliance dimmed and then disappeared entirely; for a few moments the Well became utterly black, a lightless hole gouged into the desolate earth.

"It is the mountain turned upside down," !Xabbu had said when they first approached it, even as Azador hurried ahead of them like a man rushing to meet his lover after a long separation. Sam hadn't quite understood, but she thought she could see now what he meant. Everything in this most other of Otherlands seemed to be something else turned wrong-way 'round.

She was grateful to spot the fires of the Gypsy camp at last. The more she looked at it, especially during the times it went dark, the more the Well came to resemble a cave, a burrow. She could imagine something as big as the mountaintop giant but even more disturbing suddenly climbing up out of its swirling depths. But the Gypsies, like the other fairy-tale denizens of the place, did not seem frightened of the Well at all. For them, the end of the world had become the occasion for reunion and even celebration. As she and !Xabbu made their way back across the base of the bluff and down into the camp they could hear music and singing voices.

Felix Jongleur had not joined them in their search. Sam had been grateful, although she thought it odd that such a sour, cold-eyed man would choose to remain in the Gypsy camp, surrounded by living stereotypes of carefree amusement. Now, as they came back through the outskirts of the camp, she saw him sitting by himself on the steps of one of the wagons, watching a trio of Gypsy women in long shawls dancing to a busy fiddle. She pulled !Xabbu in another direction: at the moment, she thought their hearts were both too heavy to deal with that terrible old man.

Azador had spotted them making their way across the camp and came to meet them. He had traded his travel-worn clothes for new ones, a colorful vest and puffy-sleeved white shirt. His black boots shone. He had even combed and oiled his hair, which gleamed nearly as brightly as his boots. With his splendid smile and chiseled jaw, he looked like something from a not-very-convincing netflick.

"There you are!" he called. "Come! There is music and good talk. We will wait until the Lady comes to us, then we will be saved."

As he led them through the settlement, which was made up of many little family camps, Sam wondered at how quickly his anger at even being thought a Gypsy had been replaced by a belonging that was almost religious. As she stared at the gathered Romany, and was occasionally stared at in return, she couldn't help feeling that they were all a lot like Azador—so extremely . . . Gypsy-ish, for lack of a better term . . . as to seem almost a joke. There were men with huge curling mustaches pounding out horseshoes on small anvils, and old women dressed entirely in black gossiping like crows on a wire. At the edge of the camp some of the others had set up games of chance and were busily fleecing all the interested non-Gypsies in the vicinity with dried peas hidden under fast-moving thimbles.

I guess this is what you get when you make your Gypsies out of old fairy tales, she thought.

Azador led them down close to the banks of the Well, where his own extended family had made their place. As he introduced his relations to her, most for the second time, a Romany parade of chats and chais and chabos, all dark flashing eyes and white flashing teeth, Sam found herself in danger of falling asleep on her feet. !Xabbu saw and took her by the arm, then asked Azador for a place where she could sleep. She was guided to one of the wagons by a clucking Gypsy granny who led her to a tiny bed scarcely bigger than a bookshelf. Sam wanted to protest that it was !Xabbu who needed the sleep even more than she did, but somehow she wound up lying down. Within seconds, it was too late to say anything.