by Tad Williams
He nodded. "For true."
"Then why do I get the feeling you're holding out? You're facing a long stretch, Mr. Pike. Eddie. Three Bug, or whatever bullshit you want to call yourself. If I were where you are, I'd be climbing across this table right now, trying hard to kiss my big Greek backside, because there aren't going to be many people offering you anything in the next little while. Unless it's someone in the shower when you go back to Silverwater, handing you a chocolate bar to bend over." He was clearly a little surprised by how abruptly she had abandoned the pretense of helpfulness, but he maintained his smirk. "So why won't you talk?
"I'm talking."
"Talk about something real, I mean. We could scrape three to five years off your sentence if you told us something useful about John Dread."
He looked at her for a strangely long time. Stan Chan started to say something, but Calliope touched his knee under the table, asking for patience. 3Big fidgeted with his scars again, sighed, then dropped his hands to the tabletop.
"Look, woman," he said slowly. "I tell you something for free. I don't know nothing about Dread. But even if I did know something, I wouldn't tell you shit. Not for good behavior time, not for reduction, not for nothing."
"But if he's dead. . . !"
He shook his head, his gaze hidden now, curtained behind those long lashes like a panther in a canebrake. "Don't matter. You don't know Dread, you never met him. You cross him, he come back out of the ground and kill you three ways. If there was ever someone be a mopaditi, come back and six you in the dark, Dread do it."
"Mopaditi. What does that mean?"
He had retreated far back now, surveying them as though from the depths of a cave. "Ghost. When you dead, but you don't go away. I'll go back to the box now."
"Well, that was useless." Stan Chan waited expectantly.
"Hang on." Calliope took out her hearplug and popped it into its padded slot in her pad. She wondered again if it was time to invest in a can. It was tedious lugging the pad around, even the new, wafer-thin Krittapong she had bought herself as a birthday present. "Doctor Jigalong is out of town. I've left her messages at work and home."
"About 'mopaditi'?"
"Yeah, I haven't heard that in street slang before, have you?"
"No." He put his feet up on the desk. "That's what, eight, nine of these people we've rousted? Not getting much."
"We got something there."
Stan gave her the eyebrow. "You mean because he used an aboriginal word? In case you didn't notice, Skouros, the man was indeed of aboriginal heritage himself. Don't you say 'hopa!' or 'retsina' or even 'acropolis' every now and then? I've been known to use the occasional ethnic expression myself—I think I called you 'round-eye' just the other day. . . ."
"He reacted when I asked him about Johnny Dread. He was surprised." Something else was bothering her too, some detail, maddeningly out of reach.
"Well, the man is officially dead. Might be reason for surprise, being questioned about someone you thought was dead."
"Might be. But there was something weird about his reaction. Maybe he's heard something on the street."
"Maybe won't get us over the hump, Skouros. What next? Charming as it may be, we're running out of street culture to investigate."
Calliope shook her head, perplexed and distressed and, with the caffeine finally drained out of her system and nothing gone in to replace it, feeling generally pretty godawful.
Sleeplessly out of skew, she sat on the couch and accessed the interview from the department system to run it on her wallscreen. She had decided for her own good to stay away from Bondi Baby. It wasn't even so much the near-obsessive interest in the waitress Elisabetta, but the fact that she had realized she was actually beginning to look forward to the gooey desserts the place served.
Not going to lose any weight that way, Skouros, she told herself. Better to stay home. She hadn't shopped in days, so there was little except crispbread to imperil her determination. She watched the questioning all the way through, then jumped back to the spot where she had first mentioned their quarry's name.
"You talking about John More Dread?" 3Big said, then said it yet again as Calliope backed up and played it over ". . . Talking about Dread?"
That's it, she thought. John More Dread. Haven't heard that one before. But why should one more alias—for a suspect who already had many—catch in her thoughts this way, like a splinter working its way under the skin? More Dread. More Dread. Where have I heard that before?
The thought of the photo taken at Feverbrook Hospital drifted back to her, the blur of dark presence, the formless, smoky face.
3Big Pike said a ghost. If there's anyone who'd come back as a ghost. . . .
She closed her eyes and opened them, trying to use the familiarity of her apartment to push back the feeling of being watched. Of being haunted.
She was back on the balcony again. The tower drew her as though she were a moth and its black immensity some kind of inverse light. Even now, with the voices gone, when she was somehow farther from it than she'd been even back in Juniper Bay, she could not ignore it.
A sparkle of red signal lights ringed the top like a crown of embers, and on the uppermost floors a few windows glowed, illuminated singly or in small clusters. Otherwise, it was only visible against the night sky because of the searchlights that swept across the empty parking lot, glancing off the shiny, irregular exterior as they tracked across the rows of painted stalls.
The voices were gone. The children were gone. Were they one and the same? Olga Pirofsky had been immersed in the dreamy unreality of her southward journey for so long that she could not quite remember. She was exhausted, too. The nights when the children had pulled her and hurried her, whispering their lives into her dreaming ear, had somehow been far more restful than the dead black hours she had experienced after they had fallen silent. Now she woke each day slow-thinking and hollow, feeling like a helium balloon that had finally leaked the last of its buoyancy and could only roll along the carpet, sagging, useless.
So what now? she asked herself. She could not pull her eyes from the tower, the center of its own dark kingdom. Go home? Kill yourself?
But she had no home anymore. Misha was gone, and Juniper Bay seemed like another planet—like the circus, like the dear, sweet murdered days when she had still been with Aleksandr. And she had pushed away those who might have helped her, Roland McDaniel and her other few friends from work, that nice lawyer Mr. Ramsey. There was nothing left for her but silence.
The voices had brought her practically to the foot of this dreadful black mountain before deserting her. Somehow it was all tangled together—the children, the tower, and the grinning, corpse-white features of Uncle Jingle, the mask she herself had worn so long she wondered if it had not somehow shaped the face beneath.
She opened her pad and sat down at the tiny pressboard motel desk. She found her gaze repeatedly swinging to the window, and at last clapped her hands to close the drapes, unable to think with the distraction of that dark warning finger.
Tired, but happy to have made a decision, Olga began to write her open-ended suicide note.
CHAPTER 6
Talking to Machines
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Another Rocket Board Fatality Raises Concerns
(visual: kids practicing at Skate Sphere facility, Clissold Park, London)
VO: Another in a string of tragedies involving rocket boards has led members in Britain's House of Parliament to consider a ban on what one member called "a ridiculously dangerous vehicle." But most board users do not agree there is a problem.
(visual: Aloysius Kenneally, age sixteen, in front of Bored! store, Stoke Newington)
KENNEALLY: "It's utterly down the rug. Most all them who blowing up, they like forty-year-old bizboys, seen? Go out on a weekend, ripscrape, crash some wrinkly shopper, dovetail into a hover bus fan. Don't down the rest of us 'cause some bizboy shouldn't even be riding hammers a micro. . . ."
It was like a horror flick, but worse, because it was really happening.
Tiny human shapes quailed before a vast and monstrous thing—a whip scorpion, Kunohara had called it. Paul could see Martine and her miniaturized companions huddled deep in the underside folds of a great leaf that shuddered over their heads as rain thumped down like bombs. He reached out, but it was only a view-window—he could do nothing to help them. The whip scorpion took a step closer, slouching in the cradle of its towering, jointed legs. A slender feeler like a stiffened riding crop reached out toward them—slowly, almost tenderly.
"You destroyed those mutants," Paul shouted. "Why can't you save my friends?"
"The mutants did not belong here. There is nothing wrong with the scorpion." Hideki Kunohara almost sounded offended. "It is only following its nature."
"If you won't help them, then send me. At least let me go to them."
Kunohara regarded him with oblique disapproval. "You will be killed."
"I have to try."
"You scarcely know those people—you told me so yourself."
Tears started in Paul's eyes. Anger expanded like steam, threatening to blow off the top of his head. Dimly, he could hear the threadlike shrieks of Martine and the others as the monstrous scorpion levered itself nearer. "You don't understand anything. I've been lost—months, maybe years. Alone! I thought I was out of my mind. They're all I have!"
Kunohara shrugged, then raised his hand. An instant later the bubble, the view-window, and Kunohara's stolid face all vanished, replaced by a scene of terrifying strangeness.
He was somewhere on the forest floor, trunks of mountainous trees stretching up all around him into the night, so large as to be almost invisible. Rain hissed and thudded all around, drops big as rubbish bins, some even the size of small cars; when they smashed against the mulch of the forest floor, everything jumped.
Paul had a sudden and horrifying recollection of the trenches of Amiens, cowering under the impersonal destruction of the German heavy guns; lightning flashed as if to further the illusion, dazzlingly bright as a phosphorus flare. Something moved on his right with a loud leathery creak he could hear even above the thumping of raindrops; the ground shifted beneath him. Paul turned and felt his heart try to climb out of his chest.
The whip scorpion shuffled another step closer to the base of the leaf and froze, motionless except for its questing feelers. By Paul's scale it was as big as a fire engine but much higher, a low, wide body slung between a gantry of jointed legs. It had no tail that he could see, but the pincers that folded like bumpers below its head were jagged with thorny spikes that would hold prey as inescapably as a crocodile's jaws. Two bright red spots low on its head, visible as the lightning flared again, gave an impression of malevolent eyes, of something summoned from its sleep in the pits of hell and angry at having been wakened.
A stream of water rolled off one of the high leaves onto the scorpion. It hugged the ground as the torrent splashed down, waiting with cold patience for the inundation to stop. For a moment Paul could see past it, to the hollow beneath a drooping leaf the size of a ski chalet, to pale human faces reflecting like pearls in the faint moonlight. He took a few steps toward them even as the scorpion ratcheted up to its full height again.
"Martine!" His voice was swallowed in the bombardment of rain. He reached and snatched up a fibrous piece of wood as long as his arm, a tree-needle or a thorn, and flung it at the scorpion. It fell harmlessly against one of the monster's legs but the movement attracted attention. The scorpion stopped and waved one of its whips in Paul's direction. Suddenly aware of what he had done, he went rigid. The feeler, like a horn drawn out twenty meters long yet not much wider than Paul's leg, swept by only an arm's length from where he stood motionless, heart knocking in triple time.
What have I done? His thoughts were as distracted and swift as his heart. I've killed myself. I can't do anything for them, and now I've killed myself, too.
The scorpion took a rasping step toward him. The whip brushed his chest and almost knocked him over. The shadow swung above him, turning, the legs angled out on either side like a forest of leaning trees. He saw the massive pincers flex outward slowly, then snap back.
Before he could close his eyes to cloak the horror of his coming end, the scorpion suddenly wheeled to the side. A tiny human figure had burst from beneath the leaf and was stumbling away across the uneven ground. The whip scorpion moved after it with appalling speed.
The little shrieking figure staggered as the many-legged darkness covered it. The scorpion's front end dipped and the pincers snatched up its kicking prize, piercing it and smashing it into an impossible configuration before levering it up to the furious machinery of the jaws.
Paul could only stare in stupefied horror. The pursuit and kill had taken only seconds. One of his friends was dead and now the vast monster was turning, leg by leg, back toward him.
Something swept down out of the trees, a column of misty whiteness that shoved the huge creature flat against the ground. Ice began to form all across the monster's carapace and crystallize in powdery chunks on the joints of its legs.
"Seven hells, nothing works anymore!" Kunohara's voice rasped in Paul's ear, then the man himself was standing beside him. Ignoring the mammoth, rigid scorpion, Kunohara grabbed Paul's shoulder, then beckoned to the people still cowering under the leaf. "Step out," he shouted. "Come and join hands—I do not know how far my personal field extends."
Still light-headed with shock, Paul watched three dim shapes tumble out onto open ground. Someone clutched his hand, then another avalanche of rain swept down, sending bits of leaves whirling into the air even as everything abruptly vanished.
He was sprawled on the virtual tatami mats of the bubble-house in dark night, with bodies all around him. A moment later the lights warmed and Paul crawled toward the nearest of the groaning figures.
"What was that barking fen?" a large shape said, squelching wetly as it sat up, "And where's this?"
Considering that the last time they had been together the teenager had tried to strangle him, Paul would never have dreamed he would be so happy to see T4b, but as soon as he saw the hand with its pale glow sticking out of the baggy one-piece outfit, he felt a kind of joy. He tugged at the skinny, black-haired sim, a form quite different than the Trojan warrior Paul had met before. "Javier? That is you, isn't it? Who else is there? Where's Martine?"
"Paul Jonas?" The voice was Florimel's. "Yes, where is Martine?"
"Over here." T4b crouched beside the third figure. "Don't look good, her."
Martine Desroubins tried to speak, coughed, then succeeded. "I will survive. The transition . . . it overwhelmed me. Paul Jonas, is that truly you? Where are we? I can't make sense of it."
"Yes, it's me." He had been counting heads, but no matter how he tried, he could not make it more than three. He was terrified to ask the next question, but had to know. "Where are the others? Did that horrible thing . . . did the scorpion get them all?"
Florimel sat upright, wearing a fairly generic middle-aged woman's sim, but recognizable by her wounded eye and missing ear. "We have not seen Renie, !Xabbu, Orlando, or Fredericks since . . . since whatever happened on the black mountain."
Paul tried frantically to think of which of the companions he might have forgotten. "But who. . . ? I saw that monster catch someone. . . !"
"It was one of the Grail Brotherhood," Florimel said, "—a man named Jiun. I suppose he thought he could escape while the creature was distracted by you. He misjudged." She looked around again. "Where is this place? How did we come here?"
"Jiun Bhao?" Kunohara said from behind them. All but Paul turned in surprise. "Jiun Bhao, the scourge of Asia, eaten in my garden by a whip scorpion?" He threw back his head and laughed.
"Pretty locked-up sense of humor, you," T4b commented, but he sounded grudgingly impressed by Kunohara's hilarity, which now had their host bent double, hugging his own middle.
"So is it you we owe our gratitude, then?" Martine asked their host.
"You certainly took your time before deciding to help, Kunohara," Paul said angrily.
The man wiped his eyes. "Oh, I am sorry, but it is too sweet. Do you know how many small enterprises Jiun has gobbled himself? How many lives he has crushed in his own claws? Jiun Bhao, eaten by a scorpion, in the rain." He shook his head. "But you are unfair to me, Jonas. I would not have left you to die. I thought I could bring you all back from here, but there are grave problems with the higher levels of my system—doubtless more effects of the larger catastrophe—and I could not move you or your companions remotely. I would even have destroyed the scorpion from a distance if I could, although the creature itself is blameless, but few of my system commands are functioning. That is why I had to come in person, so you could be touching me when I transported back."
"So now we are your guests," Florimel said slowly. "Or are we prisoners?"
"No more than I am." Kunohara sketched a bow. "However, that may prove rather less freedom than any of us would wish."
"There's something I don't understand," said Paul. "Martine, I heard your voice. How were you . . . broadcasting like that?"
The blind woman held up a shiny silver object in her fatigue-trembling hand.
"The lighter!" he said. "But I thought Renie took it from you. . . ."
"It is not the same lighter," Martine said wearily. "I will explain later, if you don't mind."
Kunohara scowled at the device. "You have already done damage by making your presence known with that." He squinted at the stylized monogram. "Yacoubian—the idiot. With his cigars and his short attention span. I should have guessed."
"It would do him no good now, even if he had it," Florimel said with some satisfaction. "Not unless they smoke cigars in hell."
Kunohara frowned. "I will not ask you to give it to me—over such things a delicate alliance might founder. But if you dare to use it again and risk leading your enemy down on top or me, I will eject you from this House and send you back to the scorpion. He is doubtless thawed by now."