by Tad Williams
The few who saw him and survived said that Hannibal himself had the same dark skin and oddly hooded eyes as his troops. Other than his gold-shod horse and his banner, went the horrified whispers, Hannibal was only distinguishable from his minions by the silver staff he carried at all times, and by the fact that he alone, of all his implacable army, seemed to find the ghastly events amusing. He laughed as the young men of equestrian families were brought before him to be butchered, laughed just as hard when their sisters and mothers begged for mercy, as though the whole terrible rampage were a kind of performance conducted for his benefit alone.
He is no human, but an evil god, survivors murmured to each other as they huddled in sewers and basements. He may call himself Hannibal, but even the scourge of Cannae was never so cruel.
As the sun set on the first day of his conquest, the evil one came to the heart of the city, the Forum Romanum. and built himself a palace there. Flies in the millions hovered over the place, darkening the red skies like storm clouds. The demon built his house from corpses and near-corpses, piling them high, skewering them face-up on tall wooden stakes to make his walls, so that each dying man's last sight was of another body being rammed down on top of his own.
At the center the arch-monster Hannibal ordered a throne built from skulls of all sizes, skulls which only hours before had held the diverse thoughts of living folk; when it was finished he sat upon it, surrounded by the high walls of his new palace—walls that screamed and bled and begged—and had the prisoners of Rome brought before him, one by one, then in bunches as the evening wore on, and to each he ordered some terrible thing done.
The old Stoic Seneca, who had advised three emperors, and who himself was the first to admit that many considered him the conscience of Rome, stood brave but weeping before the enemy's throne and quoted Euripides in Hannibal's grinning dark face, saying, "My mother was accursed the night she bore me, and I am faint with envy of all the dead."
The demon laughed loud at this, and had the old man's arms and legs carefully taken off so he should not kill himself, then kept him at the foot of his throne like a dog and made him witness to all that happened afterward.
And indeed, in the end, there was not one of the living who did not at last come to envy those who had already been killed. . . .
It was hard work being God, Dread had begun to realize.
He stood in pale sunlight before his throne room in the Forum and sniffed the dawn air, his keen nostrils sifting the scents of smoke and blood and putrefaction for something more subtle, without knowing quite what it was he sought. His soldiers, a thousand mirrors of himself, kneeled in the Via Sacra, waiting silently for orders. He sniffed again, trying to understand what he was missing, what he was pursuing on the breeze on this lovely spring morning, made only a little less so by the odor of a thousand unburied corpses. Perhaps the faint trace of purpose, of a real challenge.
Destruction for its own sake was beginning to pall, he decided as he surveyed the charred rooftops of Rome. Already he had obliterated half a dozen of the Old Man's favorite simulations, not to mention a select few belonging to some of the network's other masters, and he was beginning to find such exercises boring. It had been exciting at first—he had spent several days engineering the rape of Toyland, testing his cruel imagination to such a degree that near the end, as he lay sated in the midst of the wreckage like a lion beside its kill, he had an almost unheard-of moment of self-doubt, wondering if the elaborate tortures he had visited on Mary Quite Contrary and Little Bo Peep and Tom the Piper's Son, his thundering devastation of their fairy-tale land, might be evidence of some latent pedophilia. The idea had disturbed him—Dread found child molesters a particularly pathetic lot—and when he had moved on to his next target, savaging a charming little comic simulation of 1920s London, he had been careful to limit his more personal and arcane pursuits to those clearly of adult age. But now, several simworlds on, after pursuing the flower of Roman womanhood through fields and burning villas in this latest world, until both bravery and weeping surrender no longer intrigued him, and after a program of terror that was starting to become mechanical. Dread was definitely growing bored.
He picked one of the Dread-soldiers at random and gave it a nonfunctional copy of his silver staff.
"You're Hannibal now, mate," he told his simulacrum. "Here's your first job. Release the gladiators and give them all knives and swords and spears." He frowned. It was hard to care anymore, impossible to forget he was just talking to a poor copy of himself. "Oh, and destroy all the food stores. When that's finished, you and the rest of the soldiers withdraw, form a perimeter around the city, and we'll see what the survivors get up to."
He did not wait for an answer—what did it matter?—but flicked himself back into the heart of the system.
The problem was, it was so easy to destroy things here, but hard to keep it interesting. Initially, of course, just the idea of wreaking this kind of havoc within the Old Man's staggeringly expensive simulations had been pleasure enough, almost like giving the ancient bastard a good beating, and the endless power to cause horror on such a scale had its own intriguing allure. Now he was beginning to feel the limitations of the exercise: soon his complete license to roam the worlds of the network and do to them what he wanted would lose all savor. In any case, it was not true destruction: unless he froze them in eternal and somewhat boring devastation, or destroyed the code behind them (a very different and far less viscerally satisfying kind of revenge), the simulations eventually would simply cycle through and start over and all the destruction he had committed would be wiped away as though it had never happened.
Dread floated in midair in the immense but mostly featureless complex he had built for himself, an open-plan structure crafted entirely of smooth white virtual stone. Outside the windows stretched unclouded blue sky and the endless Outback scrubland he had seen on netshows in his childhood but had never visited, the emptiness that filled the center of his native country. It was not enough simply to hold gross power over the network, he was beginning to think. With the whip of pain—or its analog, since there could be nothing like true pain for an artificial intelligence, however lifelike—he had demanded it give him unlimited control, repeatedly scorching the operating system until it abandoned all protections against him. But even though control had been given to him, there were still too many limitations, and it galled him to realize that although he had equaled Jongleur's power over the system, he still could not surpass it. He could not locate an individual user, for one thing—the system was too complex for that, too distributed. If the blind woman Martine had not announced her presence over an open communication channel, he would not have known she was alive, let alone been able to guess where she was. He regretted now that he had been busy with Dulcie at the time: a quick check of the Kunohara simworld revealed that his former companions' whereabouts were again unknown. He should never have left it to anyone else, even Jongleur's own agents. Especially Jongleur's own agents. Dread was developing a greater understanding of the Old Man's frustration with incompetent subordinates.
Confident, cocky, lazy, dead, he reminded himself. The Old Man had thought himself unquestioned master of the network and he had lived to regret it. Dread decided he needed to pay better attention to avoid making similar mistakes. But who could threaten him?
It was not all bad, he reflected—if nothing else, locating Martine and the rest of his former companions would be the first challenge he had found in days. And Jongleur himself seemed to have disappeared from the system entirely, even disconnected from his own system's port into the network. Was he dead, or simply offline and lying low? Dread knew his victory would not be complete until his onetime employer groveled before him. It would be a fine day when it came. Even the devastation of Toyworld and Atlanta and Rome would seem like a picnic compared to what Dread was planning for Felix Jongleur.
Oh, and the Sulaweyo bitch. Not only was the virtual Renie out there somewhere in the Grail networ
k, but Klekker and his boys should be getting hold of her real body very soon now. He made a mental note to check on the progress of the Drakensberg operation. Won't that be interesting? I'll have her offline and online, both—her body and her mind. It could be . . . very special.
Dread let the halls of his ice-white palace fill with music, a children's chorale from out of the random choice of his system. The singers, innocent as bees making honey, brought back to him the final hours of Toyland, a thought that at this moment he found aesthetically unpleasant. He dropped the voices in pitch and felt relaxation flow through him.
God, or at least the Grail network's bloody-handed equivalent, rested a while from his heavy labors.
The thing is, he thought after a while, I can't do without little Dulcie Anwin just yet. I don't know how to make new things, I don't really know how to modify things in any big way. The operating system is like a door—if I lean on it, it opens or closes, but the options are pretty limited.
He had tried giving it natural language commands, but either the system was not set up that way or it was pretending not to understand. All the pain he could inflict on it had not made it communicate, which had left him only able to reshape things that already existed—mutation gradients, sim replacement algorithms. Such limitations were frustrating, and the need to work with the vagaries of a network that should have been his like a cheap whore offended him.
One thing was clear: if he wanted to find Renie Sulaweyo and Martine Desroubins and the others, he needed to be able to use the system in a more sophisticated way. Jongleur's own agents were hopelessly flawed, based on what was happening in the bugworld. Dread was also beginning to think nothing else in this virtual world could be nearly as interesting as getting his own hands on the real people who had defied him. And he would take such magnificent revenge when he did! Something fabulous and inventive and achingly slow. Surely the mind that had imagined flaying the leading citizens of Rome, then turning their skins into hot air balloons set aloft with their families clinging to the bottomless baskets—surely a mind of such artistry could deal with his few remaining enemies in a way that would be truly awesome, even . . . beautiful?
Dread slipped into a half-sleep, floating in his white palace, chasing ideals of pain and power that others could not even imagine.
The elevator seemed to take a long time to go down ten floors. Anger made him tight all over, hot and full of pressure. When the door at last whispered open, Paul thought he might explode out into the reception area like boiling blood out of a hemorrhaging artery.
There was no one at the reception desk, which was just as well—he didn't much like the pale, angular young woman who usually sat there, and didn't want her to see him screaming like a maniac. He walked around the curved room, just composed enough not to trip over any of the stylish and expensive Rostov Modern furniture, and laid his hand on the door panel.
His first reflexive thought at seeing them huddled close together at the desk, the small neat head almost touching the shiny bald one, surprised even him.
They know all the secrets. All the bad secrets.
He stood in the doorway, suddenly aware of his own breach of propriety, his own relative powerlessness, and the self-righteous fury cooled. But there was another side to his upset, the silly, embarrassing part of him that believed all those childhood ideals, the ones he had dragged with him through school like a ragged coat despite manifest evidence that it was going to lose him more friends than it gained. No sneaking, no grassing—he still believed it. Duty and fair play. All that high-minded public school nonsense, which the children who had been born to it had discarded while they were still in short pants, but which to a scholarship boy like himself was exotic and precious.
He looked at the two of them, silent and oblivious to the intruder, undoubtedly communing through some cordless connection—Paul himself didn't even have a neurocannula, further proof of his old-fashioned hopelessness—and could not help feeling exactly like a schoolboy again. He had come to scold the older boys for not playing fair, but now that he was alone with them, he knew that what he was going to get was a terrible beating.
Don't be stupid, he told himself. Besides, they don't even know I'm here. I can just turn around and come back later. . . .
The eyes of the small one came up, flashing behind the spectacles, giving the lie to his self-reassurance.
"Jonas." Finney stared at him as though he had arrived naked. "You are in my office. The door was closed."
His companion Mudd was still oblivious, staring at nothing, a grin of disturbing pleasure stretching his lips.
"It's just. . . ." Paul realized he was short of breath, his heart beating now not from anger but from something closer to fear. "It's . . . I know I should have phoned first. . . ."
Finney's face was so pinched with disapproval that Paul actually felt his anger smoldering up again. This wasn't school. Nobody was going to thrash anyone. And he had a bone to pick with this little shrew-faced man.
Mudd abruptly surfaced, touching his hand to his neck and then turning his piggy eyes toward Paul. "Jonas? What the hell are you doing down here?"
"I've just talked to a friend of mine." Paul stopped to take a breath, then realized he was better off forging ahead while his courage held. "And I have to say, I'm very upset. Yes, very upset. You had no right."
Finney tilted his head as though Paul were not only naked but frothing. As the angle changed, the nearly invisible overhead lights turned his spectacles into two blank bars of white. "What on earth are you babbling about?"
"My friend Niles Peneddyn. He was the one who recommended the job to me." Paul took another breath. "He said you contacted him."
One of Finney's eyebrows rose, thin as a fly's leg. "He recommended the job to you? That's droll, Jonas. He recommended you to us—and a good thing, because Mr. Peneddyn, unlike yourself, is of a well-known family and has excellent connections."
It was a line of insult he knew well. He did not let it distract him. "Yes. Yes, that's him. He said you contacted him."
"So?"
Mudd leaned his huge hip against the desk like an elephant scratching its hide on a tree trunk. "What exactly is your problem, Jonas?"
"I just talked to him. He was very concerned. He said you told him there was a problem in my relationship with my pupil."
"He recommended you to us. We wanted to make sure there was no mistake—that he had not simply done a favor for someone he didn't really know."
"What problem?" Paul had to struggle not to shout. "How dare you do that? How dare you call my friend and suggest that there's something . . . irregular in my conduct?"
If the moment had not been of such high seriousness, Paul would have almost thought Finney was hiding a laugh. "Oh, and that upset you?"
"You're damn right it upset me!"
A few moments went by. In the silence, Paul's memory of his own voice grew louder and louder, until he began to suspect he had actually shouted at his multtzillionaire employer's right-hand man.
"Listen, Jonas," Finney said at last, all trace of humor certainly gone now. "We pay close attention to all our responsibilities—Mr. Jongleur is a very, very bad man to displease. And we happen to believe that there are . . . tendencies in your relationship with your pupil we don't like."
"What tendencies are you talking about? And what are you basing this on?"
Finney ignored Paul's second question. "There seems to be too great an emotional attachment developing between you and Miss Jongleur. We don't approve, and rest assured, her father would most definitely not approve either,"
"I . . . I have no idea what you're talking about." he shook his head, but his courage was flagging. They must know something about the secret meetings, he felt sure—he should never have let himself get into such a position. Damn his own tendency to let things happen to him! But if they guessed even a little bit of what was going on, wouldn't their response be far more draconian than simply a call to Niles. . . ?
Finney pulled a sour smile. "She is fifteen years old, Jonas. Not a child in most senses of the word."
"In the legal sense. In the professional sense. My God, as far as I'm concerned, too. In my own sense."
"Don't tell us about children, Jonas," said Mudd with heavy amusement. "We know all about children."
"What are you basing this on?" Paul asked. "Did Ava say something? She's a young girl kept locked up like a storybook princess—she's . . . well, she's a little eccentric, perhaps, imaginative. But I would never. . . ."
"No, you would never," Finney said, cutting him off. "You definitely would never. Because we would know. And you would spend the rest of your life regretting it." He leaned forward, and even laid his pale fingers on Paul's arm, as though about to tell him a useful secret. "The rest of your very short life."
"A short life, but a merry one!" said Mudd, and laughed out loud.
Bizarrely, as the office door closed behind Paul, he heard Finney join in the laughter. It was a strange, terrible sound.
When the door opened on the top floor, the swelling scent of gardenias washed into the elevator. A moment later, before he had taken more than a few steps into the hall. Ava had thrown herself at him, wrapping her arms around him so tightly it took him long seconds to pull free.
"Oh, darling," she said, her eyes so bright they might have been harboring tears, "do they know about us?"
"Jesus, Ava." Paul quickly led her outside into the garden. "Are you mad?" he whispered. "Don't do that."