NETFEED/NEWS: Free Speech for Talking Toys?

(visual: Maxie Mouth Insult Doll, manufacturer's demo)

VO: Parents of a nine-year-old boy in Switzerland are suing the local school authorities, saying that their child is being punished for insubordinate speech when the real culprit is a talking toy named Maxie Mouth, manufactured by the FunSmart company,

(visual: Funsmart VPPR Dilip Rangel)

RANGEL: "Maxie Mouth is a full-range interactive toy. It talks—that's what it does. Sometimes it says bad things. No matter how unpleasant the remarks may have been, they are not the fault of the owner, who is a minor child. It's one thing to confiscate the toy—we've seen a lot of that—another thing to hold a child responsible for what the toy calls a teacher. Who is apparently a fairly oppressive old bitch, by the way. . . ."

There could be no mountain so tall, it was inconceivable.

"If this were the real world," Renie gasped to !Xabbu in the agonizing middle of what seemed to be their fourth or maybe fifth full day descending the mountain, "then the top would have been above the atmosphere, in outer space. There wouldn't have been any air. The cold would have flash-frozen our bones in our bodies."

"Then I suppose we should be grateful." He did not sound convinced.

"Chance not," Sam muttered. '"Cause if we were poking up into outer space, we'd be dead and we wouldn't have to do this hiking fenfen any more."

This was a rare exchange. The exhaustion and misery of the journey were too great, the danger too constant, to encourage talking. The path still led them in a monotonous clockwise spiral down the massive black cone, but as it receded back into the mountain, or simply melted slowly into nothingness, the trail became too narrow for anything except single file, too treacherous for them to attempt any speed greater than a trudging walk with eyes flicking between the edge of the trail and the back of the person just ahead.

Sam had slipped twice, saved both times because they were now marching so closely together that everyone was within arm's reach of someone else. Jongleur had almost fallen once too, but !Xabbu had shot out a hand and grabbed the man's arm, allowing him to topple backward instead of forward. !Xabbu had acted without thought, automatically, and Jongleur did not thank him. Renie could not help wondering what she would do if the Grail master stumbled again and she were the only one who could save him.

After Jongleur's near-miss, they made it a practice to rotate positions during the dwindlingly frequent wide spots along the path, so that the four of them took turns at the front, ensuring that whoever was leading would be relatively alert. Only Ricardo Klement was left out of the rotation—consigned to the rear, where his somnambulistic stops and starts would threaten no one but himself.

It was an indescribably dreary trip. Other than the occasional odd shapes of the black stone itself, its bulges and candledrip flutings, there was nothing to look at, no plant life, not even the distraction of weather. The sky that so closely and fearfully surrounded them was less interesting than a concrete wall. Even the distant beauty of the silvery-white cloudbank below them, with its unstable shimmering and gleams of rainbow light, quickly lost the power to engage, and in any case it was far too dangerous to look over the edge for more than a few seconds. Weary feet frequently stumbled: the trail, though monotonous, was not uniform.

By the time they had gone through their third miserable night's sleep in one of the mountainside's narrow crevices—"night" signifying only the period during which they stopped walking, because the black peak remained in perpetual twilight—even the violent angers of the first camp had disappeared. Felix Jongleur barely mustered the energy for the few necessary communications, apparently avoiding even contempt as a waste of resources. Renie's fear and dislike of him did not disappear, but in the dull slog of routine and the occasional shock of accident it receded into something at the back of her mind, a small, cold thing that slept. Even Sam, despite her loathing of Jongleur, began to lower her guard a little. She still would not speak to him, but if she stumbled and he was the one in front of her, she would reach out and steady herself on his naked back. The first time she had shivered in disgust, but now, like almost everything else, it had become only another part of their bleak routine.

"I just realized something," Renie said quietly to !Xabbu. Since they had not found a place wide enough to sit, they were taking their rest standing up, backs against the mountain's side. With no sun to warm it or night to chill it, the temperature of the stone was indistinguishable from that of her own skin. "We were supposed to climb this."

"What do you mean?" He lifted one of his feet carefully and massaged the sole.

She sneaked a look at Jongleur, who stood a few meters away down the slope, spine and head pressed back against the smooth rock face. "Paul's angel," she whispered. "Ava. She said something about how we were supposed to get to the mountaintop ourselves, but there wasn't time. And then she made that gateway and dropped us right onto the path. Do you see? They wanted us to climb this whole thing. Imagine that! Having to go uphill even farther than we've already gone down." She shook her head. "The bastards. It probably would have killed half of us."

!Xabbu too was shaking his head, but in puzzlement. "But who wanted that? Who are they?"

"The angel. And the Other, I guess. Who knows?"

He pursed his lips, then wiped a hand across his eyes. Renie thought he looked wrung out—more weary than she had ever seen him. "It is like the journeys our people must make, where we must sometimes travel for months in the bush—but that is for survival."

"So is this, I guess. But it still makes me angry, someone setting up an obstacle course like this. 'Oh, and let's have them climb a hundred-kilometer mountain, too. That'll keep them busy for a while.' Bastards."

"It's a quest." Sam's voice was flat.

Renie looked at her in surprise. By the girl's slumped position, Renie had judged her too exhausted for conversation. "What do you mean, Sam?"

"A quest, seen? Like in the Middle Country. If you want to get something, you have to go on some utterly long journey and earn bonus points and kill monsters." She sighed. "If I ever get out of here, I'm never going in that fen-hole Middle Country again."

"But why would we be sent on a quest? I mean, we already are on one, in a sense." Renie scowled, willing herself to think when her weary brain wanted only to lie torpid in its skullbath of nutrients. "Sellars brought us in to find out what was going on. But those gameworld quests always have a purpose, an explanation. 'Get this and win the game.' We had no idea what we were looking for—and we still don't,"

Her gaze flicked to Jongleur, as still as a lizard on a rock. Something tugged at her memory. "It was Ava who kept sending Paul places, wasn't it? And she did it for you and Orlando, too, right?"

"That was her in the Freezer, yeah." Sam shifted position. "And in Egypt. So I guess so."

"Oh my God," Renie said. "I've just realized some- thing." Her voice sank to a whisper. "If Paul Jonas was right, then Ava is Jongleur's daughter."

!Xabbu cocked an eyebrow. "But we knew that already."

"I know, but it hadn't really sunk in. That means the answers to most of our questions might be sitting there in that horrible man's head."

"Let's open it up with a sharp rock and find out," Sam suggested.