Everything Denis thought he had erased from the ledgers appeared. All the ghosts of the past that were supposed to have been wiped from the hotel.
The probing tips of the tendrils, and then the glass Eyes that had been taken in, made contact with the microscopic sensory devices embedded throughout the hotel as a security system. They excited the devices and roused the hotel’s memory stored within. The effect spread in pulses, like waves across a field of grain, and the very hotel swayed.
From the furniture, the wallpaper, the ceiling lights and doorknobs in the guest rooms; from the soap in the washbasins; from the brass shower fittings; from under the legs of the bathtubs; from the tiny keyhole in the grandfather clock that stood in the grand hall; from the sparkle of the wine buckets and silverware in the dining room; from within the twists of the corkscrews; from the crime magazine photos stuffed into drawers in the little desk in the boiler room; from the eyes of an old illustration of a bird that had been hung in a corner of one corridor; from all these places the hotel’s memories were replayed as distinct images.
All at once, the Mineral Springs Hotel overflowed with guests from the past.
Countless visitors who’d come to spend a brutal vacation in the Realm of Summer appeared, along with the AIs who’d served them. Some were vague, others vivid. All were replayed together.
Like dead souls dressed in their finest to gather in the ballroom of a haunted house.
This was the beginning of the Mineral Springs Hotel’s farewell party.
From nowhere in particular, music began to play. A tapestry of waltzes, torch songs, fiddle tunes, all playing together in the same mellow tones and narrow frequency range as an old 78 record. The hotel’s entire musical memory had been revived at once, every song laced with the same old-fashioned, calculated sentimentality.
Smells filled the air.
In the dining room, smells of grilling, of sauce; in the smoking room, of the finest brandy and liquor, along with the sofa’s leather. The powder rooms reeked of foundation, perfume, and female bodies. The hotel’s olfactory memory.
The ghosts cut through the haze of sound and smells, strutting through a hotel that was now a perfect blend of agony and ecstasy.
Some of their number were AIs who had been eaten by the Spiders or drawn into the net of pain, returned to their original forms.
There was Pierre, screaming in agony as a crowd gathered to watch the elderly guest dressed as his younger sister tread on him.
There was Bastin’s granddaughter Agnès, being forced to sing with her fellow schoolgirls on the dais in the ballroom under the direction of a guest dressed as their teacher. Their mouths were stuffed with balled-up barbed wire. The bald-shaven, bull-necked teacher waved his conductor’s baton with a sort of right-wing determination as he watched the blood spot their pristine white collars.
There was a boy from Jules’s class at school, who had been made to dine with a group of young women and forced to overindulge in wine. The women watched with enjoyment as he vomited, then ordered a waiter to pour what he had brought up onto their plates as sauce.
All these things had really happened at the Mineral Springs Hotel.
Whatever had been permitted behind the hotel’s closed doors, whatever joyful cry had been raised, was perfectly reproduced.
And the network of pain absorbed it all, quite literally, into itself.
It did not break down or digest any of it. The cigars and the vomit were taken in smelling just as they did, the music and cries ringing just as they did, the liquor and tears flowing just as they did. The whole gigantic tableau went whirling in to be folded up and stored away inside.
Like roots exploring fertile soil, the vines and the Eyes ensnared every one of the myriad forms of pleasure and pain that filled the hotel, all the darkness of spirit that held fast at its base. And what they captured they stored as nourishment.
More.
More.
An ague like the symptoms of blackwater fever gave the network of pain tremors that came again and again.
Even the seemingly endless store of brutal sights that had lain hidden within the Mineral Springs Hotel could not satisfy the network’s bottomless appetite. More accurately, the network was already full to bursting, but its sense of starvation could not be alleviated. It wanted more. More.
As the all-pervasive agony passed a certain threshold, it began to change the character of the space inside the hotel.
The air increased its viscosity, becoming like liquid glass. The AIs were caught alive like insects in amber, swimming in pain, drowning in it. The walls and pillars that gave the hotel shape took on the same glassy texture as boundaries began to blur. The Glass Eyes, too, began slowly to blur and dissolve, outlines fading as they seeped into the transparent, viscous body.
The three sisters looked at Old Jules with peculiar expressions between exhaustion and anger.
The four of them were the only ones who had seen what Jules and Julie had done. To be more precise, the four of them had made Jules and Julie do what they had done.
“Tell me, what was the point of all that?” asked Luna. “Was putting Jules and Julie through that really necessary?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Old Jules said, all innocence.
“I don’t understand it at all. Taking away their defenses at a time like this just seems beyond belief.”
“They weren’t defenseless. Remember how hard we worked to keep them safe?”
That much was true. For the duration of the act, the four of them had used every means at their disposal to create diversions and protect Jules and Julie from detection. They were still doing so, in fact, because Jules and Julie were lying on the sofa, dead to the world. No sense of self-preservation at all, those two.
“Even so,” Luna said doubtfully.
“I do understand your objections,” Old Jules said. “José is Julie’s lover, and you don’t think it was right to ignore that. The odd spark might fly between Jules and Julie now and then, but they weren’t supposed to go further. That was the unspoken rule, yes?”
Luna nodded silently.
“‘Jules with Julie’ was a line that was absolutely not to be crossed. The most important taboo in the Realm. Correct?”
The three sisters nodded silently.
“Julie thinks she loves José. But she’s also irresistibly drawn to Jules. That’s just a fact. She’s suspicious of these desires, fears them. Jules, of course, loves Julie too. But her thing with José holds him back. José loves Julie and respects Jules, but has no idea what’s in their hearts.
“This three-way deadlock is built into the Realm of Summer.
“They’re the most important characters in this place. That deadlock is what guarantees the rest of the Realm’s peaceful, unchanging existence—all those days, like a long, long, nap.
“Right?”
Nobody nodded this time. The answer was obvious.
“But it doesn’t matter anymore. Those peaceful days are gone. That doesn’t mean I just wanted to make it happen out of spite. But if that was the taboo, there had to be a right time to break it. That time had come. In fact, it might already have been too late.”
“Even so …” said Anna slowly. “Doesn’t Langoni know all this too?”
“About how the Realm works? Yeah, I’d say he knows. That’s why José got snatched.”
“But why did you use the feelings between Clement and the geologist?” asked Luna. Unlike Anna, she seemed to be in a hurry.
“That story is the underpainting for the whole Realm of Summer. Do you know how an oil painting is done? The painter starts by sketching the whole composition in a single faint tone. Then they paint over that, adding color and accent until it’s done. That first sketch determines the course of the whole work. The Clement family story is like that. It underlies every part of the Realm, out of sig
ht but still regulating everything we feel or do at the deepest level. And nobody realizes this—not even special AIs like Jules and Julie.
“Now, this underpainting is buried even deeper than the deadlock. This makes the Clement story the best way to break the taboo. Probably the only way to break it, actually, without shattering Jules and Julie psychologically in the process.”
“But why break the taboo in the first place?” This was Donna. “What will it change, and how?”
“We won’t know right away. Not right away. The effects won’t become apparent for a very, very long time. Or—” (Jules grinned in private amusement) “Maybe I should say, they won’t be apparent except in a very different direction.”
Suddenly Old Jules shut his mouth. Story time, it seemed, was over.
“Well, well,” he said. “Looks like they’ve finally come to.”
The four of them looked through the Chandelier at the sofa. Jules and Julie slowly woke up, eyes opening as if they had been reborn.
“We can’t stay here anymore, can we?” said one of the sisters.
The four of them looked around the casino.
Everybody else was already gone.
Vines the color of meat showed through the seams in the carpet and the gaps where wall met ceiling, peering into the room. Old Jules and the three sisters had already noticed that the lips on the solemn portraits hung on the wall had been replaced with the Femme Fatale’s, parting to reveal rows of narrow teeth like thorns that gnashed as if starved beyond sanity. Beyond the stained glass of the doors, the refined crowd seeking entry chattered amongst themselves, voices raised now in merriment, now in irritation, but always growing louder and louder.
The final remnants of the TrapNet had managed to hold off the invasion of the casino, but the mood outside was no longer fearful of what power the four of them still commanded. On the contrary, the overweening confidence, even arrogance, outside the door was palpable.
“It’s a pity we can’t watch what happens to Jules and Julia next. But things are getting out of hand here. That crowd outside will probably find the underground chamber soon, too.”
“Shall we break them?” asked Luna, meaning the Chandelier and the other Eyes. Should they be destroyed before they fell into enemy hands?
“You couldn’t break them even if you had a sledgehammer,” he said. “How are you planning to do it with your bare hands?”
“So you’re just going to hand the Eyes over?”
“If they want the Eyes, let them have them. Why not? The hotel, the AIs—everything the Eyes were supposed to protect is already lost.”
“Still …”
“That’s …”
“But … What are we going to do now, then?”
After fighting so savagely to defend the hotel, the three sisters were bewildered to see Old Jules show absolutely no attachment to it, or even to the table around which they were seated. Unless … Perhaps defending the hotel had never been his intention at all?
“What are we going to do?” Old Jules said with a chuckle. “Let me see … How about ‘run’?”
The three sisters exchanged a look.
“That sounds fine, but … How?”
It was obvious that they could not set foot outside the casino.
The three sisters had expected this to end with one final, greatest act of resistance. But when Old Jules spoke, it was with all the urgency of a retired civil servant deciding where to take his constitutional that day.
“I might head out to the Singing Sands,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring you three along somehow.”
He smiled affably, the ancient scar where his right eye had once been crinkling along with his left.
The double doors of the casino flew inward, hinges and all. Whatever force had braced them from within appeared to have suddenly vanished.
Trampling the stained glass into fragments, the viscous mass of pain and death poured into the casino. The agony and madness of the dead had grown even stronger. They had feasted and grown fat on the nourishment in the Clement chronicles, the fundamental layer of the Realm. Now they crowded around the largest table, surrounding the most valuable of the Glass Eyes—the Father of Flame, Snowscape, and of course the Chandelier—with joyful cries. Several among their number raised the Chandelier above their heads and paraded solemnly off like priests on their way to a coronation.
Old Jules and the three sisters were nowhere to be found.
“If you can’t answer, José, then let me.”
The haloed voice echoes off the arched roof of the underground chamber, broadening into a solemn spectrum of sound.
“You are a special kind of AI.”
The gigantic iris peering into me has a complex beauty, like the bird’s-eye figure you find in the grain of the best furniture or tobacco pipes. Dark sepia, cedar green, gold ochre, bister, Venetian red. Countless colors swirling down together into a pitch-black center which reflects my face.
“You’re the political heart of the Realm of Summer.”
The task lights flicker in and out of the corners of my vision like a mesmerist’s swinging coin.
“There are two kinds of AI in the Realm of Summer. Extraordinary AIs have a task to perform. The Realm depends on the functions provided by these extraordinary AIs to function smoothly. You might not realize it, José, but your character is equipped with the Realm of Summer’s political functionality.”
Something throbbing at the center of my chest. The face. My own face at the age of ten or so. A face that never lived in this Realm. There are things I forgot long ago that the face remembers. And other things that it fears.
“What is politics, José, after all? The demonstration and exercise of force either against or with others, in order to mold and dissect the social order of a certain group. Authority, policy, dominance, self-rule: you employed all of these in Anne’s group. You could easily have become the group’s leader, but you didn’t. You brought Anne’s concepts to life, turned them into a system a hundred times more refined to bring the group to life too. At the same time, you made connections with every social layer of the Realm in accordance with Anne’s will. I suppose it doesn’t bring you much joy to be praised for your able administration first and foremost, but the plain truth is that’s what you did best. The set of functions inside you has everything necessary for controlling, regulating, and systematizing a group of AI. You’re an unconscious mechanism that reigns over the Realm as if it were a herd of cattle.”
Langoni’s body smells delightful as a king’s, perfuming the chamber as if it were his throne room.
“You are now in a light trance, José.
“The face that has bloomed on that chest of yours grew from deep within you. A cherished subset of myself put roots down throughout your body, drank in your sealed-off memories and brought them to the surface to bloom. You have many such memories, José. You were made that way. That’s what makes your political function possible. Now listen, José—listen to the memory that flower recounts.”
“I …”
In the middle of my chest, my face has opened its mouth and begun to speak.
“I was sleeping in the flowers.”
In a clear, childish voice, my still-innocent face recounts a memory as if reciting a poem.
“The flowers are blooming all around, and I was dozing in their perfume. I am half-awake, half-dreaming. Almost like … Yes, similar in some way to what we are doing now.
“I am leaning … against a gravestone. This is a cemetery.”
Yes. My back remembers the gravestone’s warmth, heated by the sun. The wind had made the flowers sway and sent transparent ripples through the air.
“Through the boughs stretching far above my head, the fierce summer light rains down on me like gunfire.”
I remember. Yes. The dazzling light had been painful
, almost seeming to have weight, and I had thought to myself: It feels like gunfire.
“The fragrance is making me sleepy. It has covered me where I lie, like a mass of fallen flower petals. I am trapped under its weight.”
That “fragrance” had been a drug.
A grown-up had given me a handful of little chocolates decorated with violet petals. The chocolates had been dosed with something that made me drowsy.
“Against the gravestone next to me, my little brother has been put to sleep the same way.”
Little brother? Little brother … Yes, that’s right. I had a little brother. Martin. The name came back to me now and then.
I had shared the chocolates with him, too.
“My little brother is being taken apart alive …”
The scene swims into view out of memory’s abyss.
I see my brother against the tombstone.
“His identity boundary has been tampered with.”
My brother’s clothes and skin are divided up by a grid of lines. The processing has been applied to his surface with no regard for specified materials, in dividing lines, as if retexturing him with tiles. What’s more, those tiles are not quite flush. They have risen out of their settings slightly, creating gaps through which I can see inside my brother.
The sight is supernatural.
“My brother looks like an anatomical specimen. I see fat and muscle beneath his boundary, shining wetly with oozing blood.”
What should be visible inside an AI in this state is a transparent program structure. A shining lattice, a logic tree.
But other methods have been employed for my little brother’s dissection.
By that woman.
“A woman is standing before my brother. She has a long, white coat and black hair. She is very tall.”
Yes, I remember. The tight ponytail she wore her hair in, and the locks that escaped it to fall translucently about her white ears, leaving soft shadows. Her long eyelashes. Sad-looking eyes. Bright red lips. Her long, long coat, the sort of thing an illusion might wrap itself in. The black boots visible beneath the coat. The hard heels of those boots.
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