He seemed to have bucked up a bit. His eyes brightened up. Reaching out, he caught a tiny girl running past, her clothes generic, her eyes beaming with joy. He tousled her hair and let her go. Laughing happily, the little mite ran off to chase a butterfly. The children seemed to be perking up. Their voices grew louder, their laughter more frequent.
"Okay, Doc. Yours is a holy cause. I'll do what I can to help you."
He shrugged. "You will, no question about that. Accept them into your clan, enter them onto your books and let's start raising them. If this year we manage to digitize two or three hundred, then my life is complete. No matter how long I live, I'll never do something as good as this.
I shrank back. "Doc, what are you saying? What clan? These are Dead Lands! This is the Valley of Fear, not some Little Lambs Nursery! These children need saving, I agree. But we need to do it collectively, all of us—not drag this millstone all by ourselves! We could buy a house in the city or introduce some kind of non-mandatory tax for the clans."
Doc forced a smile. "Didn't you say that this was the safest place for your clan members? Go ahead, then, grow the new generation of AlterWorld denizens. My wife will soon move here permanently to join our daughter and her friend. I'm laying the groundwork now with some of the parents. I'm sure that after the initial shock of losing their child, then realizing that it's alive and well even if unreachable, many of them will be able to understand and help us. Some financially, others might go digital themselves.
"Doc!" I groaned. "In another three months this place may be sheer hell. It's war we're looking at!"
He stared at me, uncomprehending. "Who would dare attack a children's home? On the contrary: they're the best guarantee of the castle's safety."
I shook my head. "What planet are you from? When did it stop big kids from trampling the little ones' sand castles when they ran around playing at war? Also, I'm not some scumbag to hide behind toddlers' backs."
Lena came out of the Temple gates leading the boy who was already clutching a puppy to his chest. She clapped her hands, attracting the others' attention,
"Children! Who wants to feed the baby dragons with me?"
Screams of joy and a forest of raised hands. She smiled. "Then we'll go now to that big heap of purple scrap metal and each of you may take a tiny piece. Baby dragons love it. Then we'll all line up and march on to feed Draky and Craky."
I couldn't take it much longer. "Lena! Stop wasting mithril. Can't they just eat some normal metal, there's plenty lying around?"
She shook her head sternly. "Steel gives them colic. What difference does it make, anyway? It's either us or Vertebra brings them a whole tank turret again."
I clutched at my heart. "Which Vertebra? Which tank?"
"The big dragon, I mean. She's a Bone Dragon, isn't she? So I called her Vertebra. The tank—well, I don't know much about them. She brought them this turret with two really delicate guns. It's really nice... was. Vertebra says mithril is very good for them. They're at that age when their bones and scales are forming. They grow them out of whatever they eat. Vertebra said they're going to be the first mithril dragons in the world, imagine!"
Oh, no. Some people had rats in their grain barns. I had dragons. What the hell was going on?
Lena clapped her hands again, "Attention, everybody! In a moment, you will see a small square window right in front of your eyes. In it, you'll see two buttons. You must will yourself really hard to press the one that's on the left. Everyone remember where your left hand is? That's right! Are you ready? Press it!"
I was watching, slightly dumbfounded, as system messages flashed before my eyes,
Alexandra Kovaleva, Level 1 Druid, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!
Jana Novac, level 1 Cleric, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!
Sergey Tischenko, level 1 Warrior, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!
Chapter Twenty-Three
Their heartrending voices had long died away but my lips were still moving as I repeated Doc's last phrase,
"Who if not us?"
A very uncomfortable question, once again raising the subject of responsibility. Instead of playing and having fun, I kept sinking deeper into local problems, lugging the load of other people's hopes and struggling in a net of responsibilities that hadn't been mine to accept.
Of course I understood Doc, at his wits' end with frustration, overwhelmed by the never-ending chain of deaths. He was like a cat saving her kittens out of a burning house: her hair smoldering, her eyes swollen with blisters, diving back into the flames time and time again to pull out her wailing babies one at a time. Doc, too: once he'd seen a ray of hope in the dark, he followed it, throwing caution to the wind, selling his apartment, exposing himself to blows from all quarters, all to pull his babies out: not so much where to, but more importantly, where from.
How could I not understand him? How could I have said no? True, he hadn't warned me; he hadn't asked for my advice. Probably, in the light of his objective it all seemed petty and irrelevant. Like a lip-biting kamikaze pilot pointing his plane at the deck of an enemy aircraft carrier, he saw no problems, only his goal and his duty. In his mind he was already there, burning alive on the mangled deck amid crumpled metal, taking hundreds of enemies and their powerful machine with him.
I had no idea how it was going to work out with the children. In case of war, we could always move them somewhere safe—say, to the Vets to begin with. No human being would object to offering shelter to a child in danger. Besides, they wouldn't have to walk the war's endless roads as refugees. Here, reaching safe areas was as easy as activating a teleport. Wish we had this skill back in 1941 when millions of people had perished in blockades and ambushes. The siege of Leningrad alone had cost us way too dearly...
In principle, given another ten to fifteen years, these kids who knew no other home but the world of sword and sorcery could become its strongest warriors. They would have no inkling that it was all a game. They'd have no doubt that magic is real, invisibility is normal and healing someone is as easy as waving your hand over them. They would be the ones to invent new spells and bring magic under control. There had to be a difference, making knights and wizards out of thirty-year-old office rats and housewives or raising them from two-year-old toddlers. Which of them would I bet on in the long run? Quite possibly, he with enough intuition to foresee this trend now and take the young wolf cubs under his wing could be looking at a considerable jackpot sometime in the future.
Still, I had to do something about Lena. This was a classic case of cognitive dissonance causing me to expect more from her: more responsibility, more help and more maturity. I kept forgetting about the barely teenage girl locked inside that voluptuous adult body, her hormones raging (if that were at all possible here). So I really had to put my foot down before she derailed us all. And seeing as we had a kindergarten in the making, it would be a good idea to introduce a similar hierarchy in the clan itself: we'd have a junior group, a senior group, pre-school, primary school and so on.
I spent a few more minutes distributing some basic rights between the groups, making sure that senior clan members had a few more options than the younger ones. With a vindictive grin, I removed Lena from the clan officers' list and moved her to a new group, Junior High. After a moment's thought, I added one final touch. Poking out the tip of my tongue with zeal and satisfaction, I wrote: Valley of Fear Junior High. Now, baby, you'd have to prove to me you merited a promotion! Best regards.