Mode 2 - Fractal Mode by Piers Anthony & Mark Winston

Author:Piers Anthony & Mark Winston [Anthony, Piers & Winston, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781423353317
Publisher: Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD
Published: 1992-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

;. They ran on. Provos stumbled, and fell, and Colene fell

##',,' with her, dragged down by her own hold on the woman. Pain lanced through them both: the sharply pointed crystals had

; Stabbed through their clothing and punctured their skins.

'#. Colene scrambled up, cutting her hand in the process, |p; and lifted on Provos, who seemed not to feel the physical pain. $#;. Blood was flowing, soaking their clothing, but they couldn't

f 78 FRACTAL MODE

VIRTUAL 179

worry about that. "On! On!" Colene cried. And in the back of her mind she realized that this was the first time in a long time that her blood had flowed when she hadn't cut herself. When she wasn't being suicidal.

The rightness became so strong that Colene realized that they must be at the verge of the anchor. But they weren't physically on it; they were to one side. Where was it?

With horror of another kind she realized that it had to be up on one of the mesas. They had to climb to the top. But how could they? The sides were so steeply angled that they were clifflike.

"Come on!" Colene cried, hauling Proves after her as she circled the most promising mountain. It wasn't big around the base, but they did cross several reality boundaries in the process.

Then Colene found what she had hardly dared hope for: ladder steps. There were people here, and they did come down off their platforms sometimes, so they had made notches in the stone. In fact there were parallel series, so that one person could climb while another descended.

"Up!" Colene cried, shoving the woman at the right-side ladder and taking the left herself. Colene climbed a few rungs. "Up! Up! It's the only escape!"

Provos stared at her vaguely, preoccupied by the torment within. Colene tried again. She put all her strength into trying to project her thought mentally. Up! Escape the monster! Up!

It got through. Provos grasped a rung and hauled. Once started, she moved rapidly; she was used to vertical houses and in good condition for climbing. Colene had to scramble to keep up.

Gasping, they reached the top. The mesa was only a few feet across, roughly circular, and it was empty. Had they come up here for nothing? No, the anchor had to be here.

Colene took Proves1 arm. She stepped to the center of the circle.

Reality changed. Not on this mesa, but on the adjacent one, whose top was about sixty feet away across the chasm between them. It now had a house. Or perhaps a castle, girt by a small forest.

Colene stepped toward it, still holding Provos, passing through the anchor. Suddenly the horror in Provos' mind abated. They had escaped the monster!

But that monster would surely catch Provos again if she stepped back into the Virtual Mode. They had to hide here for a while, until the thing lost interest.

Where could they go? They could not reach the larger mesa, unless they climbed down the cliff and walked back through the crystalline valley. They were already bleeding from their prior tangle with those crystals.

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