Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond Read online

  “I wasn’t looking for you until just now,” Orlando said, wading out of the water with the squirming Cat still clutched securely under one arm and the policeman’s bearded head cradled in the other. When he reached the spot where Omby Amby’s body lay stretched on the ground, Orlando set the head on top of the neck, and the two parts immediately joined together. The Policeman stood up, unharmed except for the water drizzling from his long, green beard. “Goodness, it’s nice to be back,” he said, rubbing his throat. “I’m not sure what happened. One moment I was kneeling down having a drink; the next I was lying facedown in the stones on the bottom of the stream and unable to move. What happened to me?”

  “Curiosity,” explained Orlando shortly. “But let’s get you back to Emerald and into a warm bed. Your beard should dry by the time we get back.”

  “But I’m not cold!” Omby Amby protested, but then paused to consider. “Well, my body isn’t, but I suppose I do feel a bit of a damp chill on my head…”

  Relieved to find it had all been a mistake, or at least that their accusations against each other had been untrue, Tinman and Lion led their charges back to the Works and Forest. Orlando and Scarecrow returned to the Wizard’s white house on the hill to talk things over, the Cat still wrapped firmly in the Wizard’s coat.

  “You wanted things to be exciting, didn’t you?” Orlando asked the Cat. “You liked being the center of things.”

  “What if I did?” She turned her head away. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “There is if you manufacture a quarrel so things will become even more exciting,” said Orlando.

  “I am very disappointed in you, Glass Cat,” Scarecrow added as they entered the Wizard’s parlor. The mayor of Emerald was doing his best to make his painted smile turn downward, but without much success. “I always thought your good intentions were crystal clear.”

  “But what about Omby Amby?” asked the Wizard. “What did she do to him?”

  After the doors and windows were locked so she couldn’t escape, Orlando set the Cat down in a chair and let her wriggle free of the imprisoning coat. She wouldn’t even look at him and groomed her long glass tail as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  “The Glass Cat had just come back from Ev, where she had forgotten to give your message to the King and Queen. The reason she’d forgotten, I suspect, is because she had been visiting with Princess Langwidere.”

  “Oh, goodness, of course!” said the Wizard.

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.” Scarecrow still couldn’t make his mouth do anything other than smile, so he was doing his best to squeeze his painted cloth face into an expression of incomprehension. “What does Princess Langwidere have to do with any of this?”

  “You might or might not remember, but Langwidere has a collection of heads she likes to wear, one for every day of the month. She simply takes one off and puts another on. She keeps them in glass cabinets—she even once threatened to take Dorothy’s, although Dorothy wasn’t having it.”

  “No, I dare say she wasn’t,” said the Wizard with a chuckle.

  “I suspect that the Glass Cat begged Langwidere to teach her the trick, because she thought it would be an entertaining mischief. On her way back to Emerald, she came across Omby Amby having a drink at the stream and decided to play the head-off trick on him that she’d learned from the Princess. But when Omby Amby’s head came loose, it rolled into the water. Even though she’s made of glass, she wouldn’t have wanted to go in after it. Am I right, Cat?”

  The Cat looked up long enough to let out a tinkling sniff, then returned to her grooming.

  “But that wasn’t enough for her, I suspect. She realized that with Omby Amby unable to perform his duties, she’d have a lot more to do. She likes being in the center of things. And if there was going to be a fight, and arguing, and people upset with each other—well, she’d have even more to do.”

  “Is this true, Glass Cat?” asked the Wizard. “If so, it was very wicked of you.”

  “You people are silly,” she said. “You simply don’t have the sense of humor to appreciate a clever prank.”

  “A clever prank that almost started a war.” Scarecrow was obviously troubled and stared carefully at the Cat for a long time. Meanwhile Orlando was beginning to worry all over again. At first he had been relieved just to have solved the mystery, but the Glass Cat had proven that things could go wrong in the simulation, even if she hadn’t meant to cause as much harm as had resulted. How could they deal with her here? What if she decided to cause more trouble as soon as Orlando left? And even if Orlando simply removed the Glass Cat from the Kansas simworld—something he was seriously considering—who was to say someone else wouldn’t just start in where she’d left off? The simple-minded, simple-hearted characters could easily be led astray again.

  “Ha! My excellent brains, which you gave to me, Senator Wizard, have thought of a possible solution,” the Scarecrow said abruptly. “Do you still have that gift that the Shaggy Man brought back to you from the shores of Nonestic Lake?”

  The Wizard looked puzzled for a moment. Then he brightened and nodded. “Yes, yes!” he said. “I do indeed. But before we do anything else, I want the Cat to prove she can actually do what she claims, because I am not sure I believe her.”

  “What are you talking about?” the Cat demanded. “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “Well, I’ve never seen such a thing—making someone’s head come off with no harm to them.” The Wizard shook his head in wonder. “I find it hard to believe such a thing is even possible.”

  “I’ll show you,” the Cat said, jumping abruptly from the chair to his desk. “I’ll have your head off in a flash.”

  “No, no, I am too old for such tricks,” said the Wizard. “And everyone knows it is no difficulty to get the Scarecrow’s head off, as it is barely sewn on.”

  “Comes off all the time,” agreed Scarecrow cheerfully. “Frightened one of my council members quite badly just the other day.”

  Orlando was beginning to get the drift. “And it won’t work on me,” he said. “Because…um…Ozma put a spell on me to protect me against such things.”

  “Very well,” said the Cat, “since you are all such scaredy-people, I’ll demonstrate on myself.” And without so much as a word of a magical spell or the hint of a magical gesture (although she might have whispered something to herself), the Glass Cat turned her head all the way around once on her neck, and it fell off like the lid of an unscrewed jar. Her body slumped down onto the desk, but her head shot them a look of superior self-satisfaction from where it now lay, bloodless and quite alive, on the Wizard’s blotter. “See?” she said. “Easy as pie.”

  The Wizard lifted her head and examined it. Then he turned it neck-side-down and shook it (the head complaining loudly all the while) until the Glass Cat’s pink brains rolled out of it and onto the desk. She immediately stopped speaking, and her emerald eyes closed; even her pretty little ruby heart seemed to stop beating. Then the Wizard opened a drawer in his desk and removed a small jar of what looked like transparent glass marbles.

  “Shaggy Man brought back these beautiful crystal pearls from the salty shallows of Nonestic Lake,” the Wizard said. “They are made by the very cultured oysters who live there. The oysters are happy in the warm waters, so their pearls are lovely and clear, and I doubt there is an evil or even mischievous thought in them.” He cupped the pearls in his hand and poured them into the Cat’s head in place of the pink brains. The old brains went into the jar and back in his desk. Then he set the Cat’s head back on its neck. “There,” said the Wizard. “How do you feel now, Glass Cat?”

  She blinked and looked around. “I feel…good. Thank you for asking. It has suddenly occurred to me that I owe a number of apologies, including one to you, Senator Wizard, and one to you, Mayor Scarecrow. But I have upset others, too, and I must get right to work telling them that I’m sorry.” She turned to Orlando before jumping down. “Nice to
see you again, Orlando. Please give Ozma my love and best wishes.”

  “What will you do when you’ve finished apologizing?” the Wizard asked.

  “Something useful, I expect,” she said. “Something that will make others happy.” She jumped down, landed lightly, and walked out the door without a trace of her former swagger.

  “But is it real?” Orlando asked. “Has she really changed, just like that?”

  “Oh, no need to worry,” said the Wizard. “Those pearls will let only the clear light of Truth into her head, which everyone knows makes it impossible to be wicked. I doubt we will have any more trouble from her.”

  “It is miraculous what brains can do to improve things,” said Scarecrow. “Even if they are hand-me-downs.”

  A little while later, as Orlando was preparing to leave not just the Wizard’s white house but the entire simulation, his host stopped him. “Just one more question, if you don’t mind.”

  Orlando smiled. “Of course, Senator Wizard.”

  “We were wondering how you knew that something was wrong here in the first place. Did the Glass Cat call for you?”

  “No—in fact, she seemed a bit surprised to see me.” But as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t. How could he tell them about all the ways he was monitoring Kansas and the other simworlds? He fell back instead on an old catchall. “Princess Ozma saw it in her magic mirror, of course, and sent me to help straighten things out. She sees everything that happens.”

  Scarecrow scratched at his head with an understuffed finger. “But if Ozma saw it in her mirror, why didn’t she tell you before you left what had really transpired? Why would she keep the Cat’s trick a secret from you?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  Orlando had been formulating another lie, but the deception was beginning to make him feel shabby. “You know, I don’t actually know the answer to that. I’ll try to find out from Ozma herself. I’ll let you know what she says.”

  “Ah,” said the Wizard. “Ah.” He exchanged a glance with Scarecrow. “Of course, Orlando. We shall be…interested to hear.”

  “Is something wrong?” Orlando suddenly felt himself on shaky ground and wasn’t sure why.

  Scarecrow cleared his throat with a rustling noise. “It’s just…well, we are very grateful for your help, Orlando. You’ve always been a good friend to Emerald and the other counties of Kansas…”

  He heard the unspoken. “But?”

  “But…” Scarecrow looked embarrassed, or at least as much so as a painted feed sack could. “Well, we…we wondered…”

  “We wondered why we never see anyone else from Oz,” said the Wizard. His familiar face was kindly, but there was something behind the eyes Orlando hadn’t seen before, or perhaps hadn’t noticed: a glint of keen intelligence. “Only you. Not that we’re unhappy with that, but, well…it does seem strange.”

  The two best thinkers in Oz had been thinking; that was clear. Orlando wasn’t too sure he liked what they’d been thinking about. “I’m sure that will change one day, Senator Wizard. Surely you don’t think that Ozma has forgotten about you?”

  “No,” said the Wizard. “Of course not. Whether in Oz or Kansas, we’re all Ozma’s subjects, and our lives are good.” But something still lurked beneath his words—perhaps doubt, perhaps something more complex. “We miss her, though. We miss our Princess. And all our other friends who don’t visit any more, like Jellia Jamb and Sawhorse and Tiktok…”

  “And Trot and Button-Bright,” finished the Scarecrow sadly. “I cannot remember the last time I saw them. We wonder why they don’t come to visit us.”

  “I’ll be sure to mention it to Ozma.” Now Orlando wanted only to get out as quickly as he could, before these uppity Turing machines began to ask him to prove his own existence. “I’m sure she’ll find a way for your friends to come see you.” At the very least, Orlando thought he could reanimate a few more characters from the original simulation without causing any real continuity problems. Which reminded him…

  false alarm, mr. k—it was something that came completely out of the system itself, not a murder at all. the character wasn’t even really dead. no repeat of the kansas war, you’ll be glad to hear. (or maybe you won’t.) no need to shut it down—it’s doing all right. really. nothing to worry about. i’ll finish the official report after i get some sleep. your obedient ranger,

  o.

  Nothing wrong with a half-truth every now and then, right? For a good cause?

  Scarecrow and the Wizard came out onto the veranda of the Wizard’s white house to wave good-bye to him, but Orlando couldn’t help feeling they would be discussing what he’d said for days, pulling it apart, trying to tease out hidden meanings. Perhaps the Oz folk weren’t quite as childlike as he’d assumed.

  So was there a moral to this story? Orlando headed down the hill from the Wizard’s house and into the outskirts of Forest. Every Eden, he supposed, even the most blissful, was likely to have a snake—in this case the curious, manipulative, and self-absorbed Glass Cat. But Orlando had been so worried that this particular snake would ruin things that he had been willing to consider shutting down the whole garden. Instead the peculiar logic of the place had absorbed the conflict and—with a little assist from Orlando Gardiner, Dead Boy Detective—had resolved the mystery without any drastic remedies. But Orlando had also learned that these sims were not always going to take his word for everything, at least not the cleverest of them. Was that good? Bad? Or just the way things were going to be in this brave new world?

  Oh, well, he thought. Plenty of time for Orlando Gardiner, the only Dead Boy Detective in existence, to think about such things later, after a little well-deserved rest.

  Plenty of time. Maybe even an eternity.

  DOROTHY DREAMS

  BY SIMON R. GREEN

  Dorothy had a bad dream. She dreamed she grew up and grew old, and her children put her in a home. And then she woke up and found it was all real. There’s no place like a rest home.

  Dorothy sat in her wheelchair, old and frail and very tired, and looked out through the great glass doors at the world beyond—a world that no longer had any place or any use for her. There was a lawn and some trees, all of them carefully pruned and looked after to within an inch of their lives. Dorothy thought she knew how they felt. The doors were always kept closed and locked, because the home’s residents—never referred to as patients—weren’t allowed outside. Far too risky. They might fall or hurt themselves. And there was the insurance to think of, after all. So Dorothy sat in her wheelchair, where she’d been put, and looked out at a world she could no longer reach…a world as far away as Oz.

  Sometimes, when she lay in her narrow bed at night, she would wish for a cyclone to come, to carry her away again. But she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Her children told her they chose this particular home because it was the best. It just happened to be so far away that they couldn’t come to visit her very often. Dorothy never missed the weather forecasts on the television; but it seemed there weren’t any cyclones in this part of the world.

  Dorothy looked down at her hands. Old, wrinkled, covered with liver spots. Knuckles that ached miserably when it rained. She held her hands up before her and turned them back and forth, almost wonderingly. Whose hands are these? she thought. My hands don’t look like this.

  A young nurse came and brushed Dorothy’s long gray hair with rough, efficient strokes. Suzie, or Shirley, something like that. They all looked the same to Dorothy. Bright young faces, often covered with so much makeup it was a wonder it didn’t crack when they smiled. Dorothy remembered her own first experiences with makeup so many years ago. “Been at the flower barrel again?” Uncle Henry would say, trying to sound stern but smiling in spite of himself.

  Suzie or Shirley pulled the brush through Dorothy’s fine gray hair, jerking her head this way and that, chattering happily all the while about people Dorothy didn’t know and things she didn’t care about. When the nurse was finished, she showed Dorothy the resu
lts of her work in a hand mirror. And Dorothy looked at the sunken, lined face, with its flat gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, and thought Who’s that old person? That’s not me. I don’t look like that.

  Eventually the nurse went away and left Dorothy in peace, to sit in a chair she couldn’t get out of without help. Though that didn’t really matter; it wasn’t as though there was anything she wanted to do besides sit and think and remember…her memories were all she had left. The only things that still mattered.

  “Don’t get old, dear,” her Aunt Em had said back on the farm. “It’s hard work being old.”

  Dorothy hadn’t listened. There was so much she could have learned from wise old Aunt Em and hardworking Uncle Henry. But she was always too busy. Always running around, looking for mischief, dreaming of a better place far away from the grim gray plains of Kansas.

  She had dreamed a wonderful dream once, of a magical land called Oz. Sometimes she remembered Oz the way it really was, and sometimes she remembered it the way they showed it in that movie…she’d seen the movie so many times, after all, and only saw the real Oz once. So it wasn’t surprising that sometimes she got them muddled up in her mind. The movie people made all kinds of mistakes, got so many of the details wrong. They wouldn’t listen to her. Silver shoes, she’d insisted, not that garish red. All the colors in the movie Oz had seemed wrong—candy colors, artificial colors. Nothing like the warm and wonderful world of Oz.

  Dorothy woke up after dozing off in her wheelchair, and she was back where she belonged: in Oz. A country of almost overwhelming beauty, bright and glorious as the best summer day you ever yearned for. Great stretches of greensward ranged all around her, dotted here and there with groves of tall stately trees bearing every fruit you could think of. Banks of flowers in a hundred delicate, delightful hues. All kinds of birds singing all kinds of songs in the trees and in the bushes. Wonderfully patterned butterflies fluttered in the air like animated scraps of whimsy. A small brook rushed along between the green banks, sparkling in the sunshine, and the open sky was an almost heartbreakingly perfect shade of blue.