by Tad Williams
The look of melodramatic sorrow on her face turned into something infinitely more subtle, infinitely more painful to see. She rushed past him and disappeared into the trees that took up most of the vast towertop. A fireworks display of white and yellow birds leaped into the air, disturbed by her headlong flight. . . .
He woke to find his head on Florimel's lap, although at first it was hard to separate the throbbing ache from the lap. All his bones hurt too, and he made a little noise of pain as he tried to sit up. Florimel calmly pushed him back down again. With a strip of cloth tied over her wounded eye and ear, she looked piratical. The up-and-down motion of the bubble, which was doing Paul's head no good, added to the buccaneering illusion.
"She was so . . . unstable," he said. "I'd forgotten, but it's no wonder all the things she's told me have been so hard to understand."
"He's delirious," Florimel told Martine.
"No, no. I'm talking about Ava—about Jongleur's daughter. Another memory just came back, I guess while I was unconscious. Like a dream, but it wasn't a dream." He was bursting to tell them all that he'd remembered, but suddenly realized there was a here and now quite separate from the returned memories, no matter how sharp and new they felt. "Where are we? On the river?"
Martine nodded. "Bobbing along. No sign of Wells or the Twins or their monster insects."
"Yes," Florimel said, "and Martine and T4b and I all survived, too, although we're sore and badly bruised. Thank you for asking."
"Sorry." Paul shrugged and winced. "Kunohara?"
Florimel shook her head. "I cannot believe he lived through the collapse of his house. We never saw it come back to the surface after the river took it."
"Fishfood," said T4b, not without satisfaction. "Pure."
"So where are we heading? Is there any way to control this thing?" The ride was actually fairly comfortable, the bubble so much a part of the river that there was little jostling. He had heard once that riding in a dirigible felt the same way, because the ship moved with the air currents, not through them.
Florimel grunted in disgust. "Control it? Look around—do you see a rudder? A steering wheel?"
"What do we do then?" He sat up, resting his back against the curve of the wall, and moved carefully to disentangle himself from Florimel. They all faced each other, feet touching at the bottom of the bubble, the river water flowing along beneath them as though they hung in open space. "Just wait until we snag on a sandbar or something?"
"Or until we reach the end of the river and pass through a gateway," Martine said. "Orlando told us that many of the gates are no longer functioning. We will have to hope that if the next simworld is closed off we will be able to find another. One that is safe."
"Is that all we're going to do? Just wait and see?"
"We could worry about how much air we have in here," Florimel observed. "But that wouldn't do us any good either."
"I would rather talk about Kunohara," Martine said. "If he had denied he had an informant with us in Troy, and if it had felt to me even slightly likely that he told the truth, that would have been the end of it. But you heard him—he had no answer."
"We were being attacked by giant wasps," Paul pointed out, compelled for some reason to defend the man. "He saved our lives."
"That is not the issue." Martine was firm. Paul found himself a little alarmed—what had happened to the quiet voice, the almost ghostly presence? "If he was playing a double game, it might make a difference to us—and if one of us has kept a secret. . . ." She did not finish, but did not need to. Paul knew without being told what it had meant to these people to discover that a murderer had traveled with them in Quan Li's body, a murderer they had treated as a trustworthy friend.
"Perhaps," said Florimel. "But suspicion can be devastating, too. And we are only half of those who were in Troy."
"Just tell me," Martine said. "Tell me that you had no secret relationship with Kunohara. I will believe you."
Florimel did not look pleased. "Martine, you are not like us. Don't pretend you with not look at us with your little lie-detector rays."
"I have no lie-detector rays." Her smile was bitter, her voice hard. "Tell me, Florimel."
"I have had no dealings with Kunohara that the rest of you have not been part of." Her voice was angry, and Paul thought there was a great deal of pain, too. This network, with its masks and labyrinths, was hard on friendship.
"Paul?" Martine asked.
"The same. This is the first time I've met him—I didn't know him when I was in Troy."
Martine turned to T4b, who had been unusually silent. "Javier?" She waited a moment, then prompted him again. He looked like a spring coiled too tight. "Just tell the truth, Javier."
"Off my face, you," he snarled. Even Paul felt there was something defensive in his voice. "Got nothing to do with Kuno-whatever. Just like Florimel said, the rest of you seen it all." He seemed to feel Martine's continuing gaze as an assault. He swiveled his head angrily. "Stop staring! No dupping, I told you! Off my face."
Martine looked troubled, but before she spoke, someone else did.
"Martine? I heard you before—can you hear me now?"
It sounded so much like the familiar voice was right beside him that for a moment Paul found himself wondering how anyone could be in the bubble without being seen. Then as Martine pulled out the lighter, he understood.
"Renie? Is that you?" Florimel made an angry shushing gesture at her, but the blind woman shook her head. "Dread knows where we are," Martine said quietly. "And he will until we get out of this world, so it doesn't matter." She raised her voice. "Renie? We hear you. Talk to us."
When it came again, the voice was quieter, not distorted but diminished, with clean holes in the flow of speech. "We never left . . . mountain," she said. "We're in . . . must be . . . ocean. But I've lost !Xabbu and. . . ."
"We can't understand you very well. Where are you exactly?"
". . . Think I'm . . . like the heart of the system." For the first time, Paul could hear the terror subdued beneath collapsing control. "But I'm . . . trouble—bad trouble. . . !"
There was nothing after that, no matter how many times Martine begged her to speak again. At last Martine put the lighter away and they sat in silence, carried as froth on the river surface, hurrying toward the end of one world among many.
CHAPTER 10
The Land of Glass and Air
* * *
NETFEED/BUSINESS: Death of Figueim Leaves Shipbuilding Firm High and Dry
(visual: Figueira breaking bottle across bow of tanker)
VO: The sudden death of Maximiliao Figueira, chairman and CEO of Figueira Maritima SA, Portugal's largest shipbuilding firm, has left the company reeling.
(visual: Heitor do Castelo, FM company spokesman)
DO CASTELO: "We are all shocked. For his age, he was in excellent health, but what is even more confusing is how little preparation he seems to have made for the event of his death. He was not a man to delegate, so we had hoped he had prepared for this eventuality a little more thoroughly. We will persevere and retain our leading position in the industry, but I must honestly admit we are scrambling to untangle some very confusing arrangements. . . ."
* * *
At first it seemed like a kind of trick !Xabbu was playing, leading them carefully along the banks of a river that only he could see, but after a while even Sam could perceive clearly what her companion had sensed so much earlier.
It started as lines in the never-ending gray, faint as pencil markings but less substantial: when Sam approached one, or even changed her angle of view, the mark was gone. It was only as the lines became longer and more numerous that she saw they were rims of shadow delineating big basic shapes—rolling curves like distant hills and a line marking the river-shape !Xabbu had been following. Although there was nothing like a sun, and in fact still very little differentiation between ground and sky, the light for the first time was beginning to have an implied direction.
With the alteration of the light also came a change in the color of things. The gray became livelier and more slippery. A faint sheen moved through it, gleaming here and there like the skin of an eel. Although all around her still was strange and mostly formless, Sam felt a loosening in her heart. The endless nothing finally seemed to be coming alive.
"It's like swimming in a silver ocean," she said wonderingly. For a long time the void above their heads had been indistinguishable from the void beneath their feet; now, showing the first gleaming striations that might eventually become clouds, it was beginning to take on a suggestion of expansiveness. Sam recognized the paradox: as long as there had been nothing to look at, emptiness did not seem to stretch very far. Now it was as though someone were pulling back a blanket, opening up their view of things. "It's like being underwater. Ho dzang! I feel like I can breathe again."
!Xabbu smiled at the odd combination of images. "I think the river has a sound now, too." He held up his hand. Sam stopped; even Jongleur paused. "Do you hear it?"
She did, a faint whisper of moving water. "What does all this mean?"
"I think it means that we are going to reach something more friendly to us than all that emptiness." !Xabbu dabbled his hand experimentally where the confluence of emerging shadow suggested the river must be, but drew it back dry. He shrugged. "But we have a distance still to walk, it seems, before that happens."
"No, I mean . . . what's happening with this place? It's so scanny, just this nothing, then . . . something. Like it was growing here."
He shook his head. "I cannot say, Sam. But I think it is not so much growing as that we are moving closer to the place it is most concentrated, if that makes sense." He looked at Jongleur, half-mocking. "Maybe you can explain to us?"
The sharp-faced man seemed for a moment about to say something dismissive, but when he spoke, he was surprisingly quiet. "I do not know. This is all a mystery. The Brotherhood built nothing like this in the network, nor did anyone else."
"Then we should continue," said !Xabbu. "If we are not clever enough to understand the mystery, perhaps it will be enough if we are simply strong enough to walk until we reach its heart."
Jongleur looked at him for a moment, then nodded his head slowly. He waited until !Xabbu had set out along the translucent riverbank again before moving into a steady, trudging gait behind him.
It was strange, Sam thought, how unobtrusively an entire world could swell into being. It was like music, the kind her parents listened to, with violins and other old instruments starting almost silently then growing before you noticed it into a huge noise.
The silvery phantom landscape was now shot through with colors, although they appeared only for short moments, rippling and disappearing as she moved, sometimes to be replaced by other equally unexpected hues. The glassy, ghostly hills traced on the far horizon gleamed deep purple, taking on weight and substance until she felt she could see every detail; then, as she walked another twenty paces, the purple seemed to retreat inward, leaving behind only a sketch of the hillcrest, colorless as a shed snakeskin. A moment later, just when the shapes had almost vanished against the equally pale and undefined sky, there would be a faceted glimmer of deep tan, almost orange, and for that brief instant there would be hills again and the world had something like a normal shape.
To the extent Sam could make sense of it, she and the others seemed to be moving toward those hills along the gentle slopes of a long and meandering valley, following the river's course upstream. When the river itself took color, she could see that it had cut a deep track in the land, twisting between stones that in their phantom stage looked almost like huge and irregular chunks of ice. Some of the larger ones lay across the river's path like bricks of glass, and here the water foamed as it spilled over and around them until it found the low ground once more. A few ghost-trees clustered along the banks and on the higher knolls, but most of the land seemed to suggest grassy meadows. Only her own breathing, and occasionally a muttered curse from Jongleur as he stumbled over some feature of the increasingly solid landscape, rivaled the sound of the river. No insects hummed, no birds sang.
"It's like someone's inventing it," she said when they had stopped again to rest. She was sitting on one of the flat rocks with the river roiling and whispering just an arm's length away. !Xabbu had no further need to sniff the air and listen; he sat beside her companionably, dangling his feet. Sam had reached down and found that the water still did not quite feel like water: the sensation was cool but dry, as though chilled silk were being dragged continuously across her skin. "It's like a coloring book for kids," she continued, "and someone's just starting to test a few colors, just getting started."
"I think rather it is the other way around." His face turned serious. "I think perhaps that this place was once all full of color and shape. Do you remember the black mountain? Solid and very real at first, then later it began to fade away? I think that has happened here, too."
Sam felt her first pang of real fear in hours. If !Xabbu was right, they were walking into reality faster than it was dissolving, but could that last forever? Or would they eventually find themselves, as they had on the mountain, with all of creation vanishing around them again? Would they have to go on and on that way, through abortive worlds that coalesced and then deteriorated around them, without a stable place where they could ever just stop and live like people?
Jongleur had been standing a few paces ahead up the riverbank. He turned now and walked slowly back toward them, his expression distant.
"It reminds me of North Africa," he said. "When I was young, I spent a year there, in Agadir. Not the landscape that is growing around us—that looks almost European, or it would if it were filled in. But the light, it reminds me of the desert towns in the early morning—the silver dunes, the white light angling off the houses, everything washed out and pale as linen." He turned back from surveying the hills to see that Sam and !Xabbu were both staring at him. His mouth curved sourly downward, "What, did you think I was never young? That I have never seen anything but the inside of a biomedical support pod?"
Sam sat up. "No. We didn't think you cared about anything you didn't own. That you didn't have somebody build for you."
For a second he appeared about to smile, but he still commanded his virtual face as stringently as he had his Egyptian mask. "A touch, I confess it. But a mistaken attack if you seek to wound me. Am I cold, hard, monstrous? Of course. Have I done my terrible deeds deliberately to oppress the downtrodden, or merely to increase my own pile of luxuries, like a dragon sitting on its hoard? No. I have done what I have done because I love life."
"What?" Sam was happy to let him hear the disgust in her voice. "That's uttermost fenfen. . . ."
"No, child, it is not." He turned away, looking to the distant limpid hills. "I did not say that I loved all life. I am not a hypocrite. Most of the Earth's crawling billions mean as little to me as the insects and smaller creatures that you crush beneath your feet in the grass mean to you. It is my life that I love, and that includes the beauty I have seen and felt. It is my memories, my experiences, that I wish to preserve against death. The happiness of other human beings means little to me, it's true—but it would mean even less to me if I were dead." He turned slowly. His eyes on her were uncomfortably sharp. Sam's hatred of the man had distracted her from what he truly was, but at that moment she could feel the strength in him, knew that this was a force that had knocked down governments as though they were bowling pins. "What about you, child? Do you think you will live forever? Would you not like to?"
"Not if I had to hurt other people to do it." She was suddenly close to tears. "Not if I had to hurt children. . . !"
"Ah, perhaps not. But unless you are presented with that option you will never know for certain, will you? And especially not until you are presented with that option while knowing that Death is standing just behind you. . . ."
!Xabbu, who had been listening to the conversation, was suddenly not list
ening any more. He stood up, staring forward past Jongleur and up the riverbank.
"What is it?" she asked. "!Xabbu, what is it?"
Instead of answering he hurried up the bank, running gracefully, bounding over near-invisible stones like a deer. In a few moments he had reached a cluster of small colorless trees that plumed above the bank like the smoke of several fires. He reached up and snatched at one of the branches, stared at what he held in his hand, then hurried back down the riverside.
"Look!" he cried, skipping past Jongleur to Sam. "Look at this!"
She leaned in. Nestled in his palm was a tiny bit of white cloth lopped in a knot. It took her a moment to make sense of it. "Chizz! Is that. . . ?"
!Xabbu held it against the strip of cloth tied around her hips. "It is the same." He laughed, a wild sound unlike anything she had heard from him. "It is from Renie! She was here!" He did a little half-dance, pressing the scrap of fabric against his chest. "She left it as a sign. She knew we would follow the river." He turned to Jongleur, his mood so good it sounded as though he were bantering with a friend. "I told you she was clever. I told you!" He turned back to Sam. "We must walk now as long as we can, in case she has stopped somewhere ahead of us."
Sam of course agreed, but could not smother a sigh of weariness as she got down from the stone. !Xabbu was already walking briskly upriver once more. Sam fell in behind him. Jongleur shook his head, but followed.
For the first moments the little man's happiness had been infectious, and Sam had felt her own spirits lifting higher than they had been since before Orlando's death, but now a finger of worry was poking at her—something she could not bear to mention to !Xabbu, but which troubled her more and more.
In the Girl Scouts they always tell you that if you get lost, you stay in one place, she told herself. Sam hadn't been a great Girl Scout, but she had learned what she had to, especially the things that seemed sensible and useful. Do they have Girl Scouts in Africa, wherever Renie's from? She wasn't sure, but !Xabbu was right—Renie was smart. Somehow Sam thought Renie would know about the stay-in-one-place rule. Which meant maybe there was a reason she hadn't stayed there, in that spot she'd marked by the river.