by Tad Williams
Maybe she had to leave because something was after her.
As the light altered from depthless gray to something as slippery and bright as mercury, as she walked doggedly out of nothing into something, Renie knew she should have felt more—should have been full of excitement, exhilaration, relief. This was the reason she had been stopping every few hundred yards to wave the lighter like a dowser's rod. Finding this growing reality should have been a triumph, but she found herself moving more and more slowly instead, as if bowed beneath a heavy burden.
The thing was, this place still made no sense.
And I don't do well with things like that. She looked back to see Ricardo Klement picking his way across the uneven ground, if you could call it that, putting one foot before the other like an overwound automaton that would carry on until it walked over the edge of something and disappeared, legs still grinding.
Like my father. He made no sense either, with his self-destructive slide into alcohol and defeat. Yes, his wife had died. Yes, it was horrible. But his wife was also Renie's mother, yet Renie had managed to get up every day after it happened and take care of what needed to be done. That made sense. Surrender, slow decay, that didn't. Death would get you no matter what, and who knew what would happen then? Better to fight on.
But it seemed some people couldn't.
My father would like it here, she thought. Wouldn't have to try at all, not even pretend. Just lie on the ground and wait for the world to change around him. She hated it as soon as she thought it, hated her own bitterness.
As she stood taking her first rest in over an hour, Klement reached her and stopped, so much like the machine she had imagined him to be that at first she did not even look at him, any more than she would look at an oven that had finished its cycle and shut off.
"Tell me," Klement said in his painfully uninflected way. "Why . . . is it important, up and down?"
"What?"
He made a stiff gesture that might have indicated his own body, or the span of nascent ground to silvery sky. "Is it because . . . this? Up and down?"
She found she could not bear to look at whatever was struggling behind his eyes, trapped, lost. "I don't know what you're talking about." She turned from him and started to walk again. Klement seemed rooted in place. After a moment, just as Renie was about to stop again, he lurched into motion, following where she had walked as though trying to touch the same footfalls. She shook her head. Perhaps he was so damaged that no part of his earlier self remained, but even if it were so, that still did not make him pleasant company.
So what was this place? Jongleur had said it was not part of the network, but how could that be? It wasn't magic. There had to be an explanation.
Something was murmuring wetly a short distance away. Renie hiked up a translucent rise, noting with interest how much it changed things simply to be able to move out of the strictly horizontal, and saw a shimmering line that looked less substantial than what lay on either side of it.
A river, she thought, then: Could it be the river?
She waited until she felt sure Klement had seen her, then descended to the river's bank. She had a direction now—upstream, whatever that might mean—and was determined to follow it. She knew !Xabbu would do the same if he was ahead of her, which meant their chances of finding each other would now be improved substantially. The thought lightened her heart.
When nothing makes sense, she thought, at least there are people you love, people you need.
But if this senseless world was something the Other had invented, then what did that really mean? A construction within the network, somehow, but not of the network? And why should it mimic reality—why should there be hills and a sky, as in the Patchwork Land, and here even a river? Had the operating system been working with some dim notion that humans needed a human place to be? But why did the operating system need humans at all?
The river valley, in its tenuous way, had begun to resemble a real valley in a real world, with grass and stones and even a few stands of trees. Even the sky, which for days had been as blank as an undeveloped level in a VR system, had begun to take on depth, although it was still murky and the light diffuse, as though this entire ghost world were built inside a giant pearl.
What if !Xabbu's not ahead of me? she suddenly thought. What if he's lost in the gray—he and Sam didn't have the lighter, after all. I should stop, wait for a while. But what if they're ahead? She considered building a sign out of sticks or some of the glass-clear reeds growing at the river's edge, but knew that if they were to follow along behind her walking even a little way up the slope, they might miss a sign constructed from this environment entirely—it would be like trying to see melting ice in a glass of water. She should wait until the things around her had more substance. Then she could build a sign out of sticks, write anything she wanted—Help! I'm Being Held Prisoner By My Own Frustration! Or maybe even, Wanted, More Reality.
She sat down on what had once been—or someday would be—a log, giving Klement a chance to catch up again. A copse of phantom trees swayed around her in an unfelt wind, but made no noise, not even the merest whisper of leaves brushing leaves.
After what seemed like a quarter of an hour, Klement had not appeared.
Reluctantly, Renie struggled up the bank to the top, looking back across the rolling land she had just crossed, but there was no sign of him and little chance he could be hidden in the monochrome expanse. She cursed bitterly—not because she feared for him or missed his company, but because she had taken a sort of responsibility for him, then had allowed carelessness to undercut her yet again. After waiting almost as long atop the bank as she had waited below, she trudged back down to the stand of trees.
I have to mark the spot, she decided. Even if I don't go look for him, I have to at least let !Xabbu and the others know I've come this way. But there remained the problem of how to do it. As she thought, she distractedly pulled at the flimsy garments she had made for herself—the more real the landscape, the more vulnerably underdressed she felt—and suddenly realized what she would use to advertise her presence.
She was tying the strip of pale cloth on a thin branch that protruded far beyond its shadowy neighbors, thinking that if she had to do this many more times she would be naked again in short order, when something moved in the branches just beside her head. She leaped back in surprise.
It was a bird . . . or at least something birdlike, smaller than her clenched fist. It seemed only slightly more real than the landscape, with a tenuous shape and colors as evanescent as a scatter of broken glass. She watched it move down the branch toward her, then cock its head—a hint of an eye, the blurry suggestion of a beak. For a moment its familiar movements almost made her feel as though things might make sense again, then the bird dipped its head and said, "Didn't think."
Renie gasped and took a few backward steps. This was a crazy place, she told herself: anything was possible, therefore nothing should be surprising. "Did you say something?" she asked.
The bird changed its position again and piped, "Didn't think I would." An instant later it sprang into the air in a tiny explosion of rainbow light, then flew off across the river.
Renie had only a moment to decide. She looked at the wisp of white cloth bobbing on the branch, then back down the valley, a world of glass frozen in eternal twilight. She ran in pursuit of the bird, a speck now against the inconstant sky.
She found a shallow place and splashed across the river. As she reached the farther bank she noticed that the light had shifted in a subtle way. The environment had suddenly grown quite solid, as though she had passed through some kind of barrier that held the pressure of reality firmly in place, but that was the least of the distractions. The new world around her was so strange that she could scarcely keep the flitting bird in view.
Rolling hills and meadows had given way to a landscape of folds and peaks, as though some great upheaval had shoved the substance of the earth together into gigantic wrinkles. The te
rrain was rough and rocky, the vegetation reduced to tangles of wind-twisted pines and rugged shrubbery cloaked in mist. The burgeoning sunshine was lost now behind thick overcast, so that even though the world had grown more substantial, it was not a great deal more colorful.
She paused at the top of a rise, panting, watching the bird's flight. Her quarry had grown more solid, too, although at this distance she could make out little of its color. It alighted on a twisted pine branch hundreds of meters below her down the hillside. Its voice floated up, saying ". . . I would . . . I would. . . ." softly and regretfully as a tired child.
The track down between two ragged outcroppings was steep, but Renie had run too hard and too long to turn back. This was the first voice other than her friends' that she had heard since the mountain had disappeared, the first new living thing that she had encountered.
As she made her way down the hill the bird sat placidly on the branch as though waiting for her. The mists eddied in a slow but surprisingly chill breeze—she was discovering that not all aspects of returning reality were equally welcome—and she thought she could detect hidden forms built into the curves of land, odd, almost humanoid shapes like vast bodies underneath the soil. It was hard to tell in thin light and mist, but it reminded her uncomfortably of the monstrous figure of the Other that had greeted them on the mountaintop. She shivered and brought her attention firmly back to the rocky soil beneath her feet.
The bird tipped its head to watch her awkward approach. It had color and shape now, a bundle of reddish-brown feathers with a bright black eye, but there was still something unusual about it, something not quite complete.
"Didn't think I would ever get there," the bird said suddenly.
"Get where?" Renie asked. "Who are you? What is this place?"
"We walked for a long time," the bird chirped sadly. "Didn't think I would ever. . . ." It suddenly stood and fluttered its wings as if about to fly. Renie's heart sank, but the bird merely settled back on the branch. "Didn't think I would ever get there," it observed again. "Mama said it would take a while. We walked for a long time,"
"Walked where? Can you talk to me? Hello?" Renie took a slow step closer and lowered her voice. "I don't mean you any harm. Please talk to me."
The bird looked at her again, then suddenly leaped from the branch and flashed away down the hillside. "Didn't think I would. . . ." it called shrilly before it disappeared into the mist.
"Jesus Mercy!" Renie sank down onto the stony ground, close to tears. She had traded a place beside the ghost-river for nothing except an exhausting run and a cold, foggy hillside; she would need a long rest before she could manage the climb back up. "Jesus Mercy."
It was only when her chin bumped against her chest and she jerked her head upright that she realized she had fallen asleep—whether for seconds or minutes, she could not tell, but the misty landscape seemed distinctly darker now, the shadows deeper in the folds of the hillside, sky shaded from pearl to a stormy gray. Renie staggered to her feet, keenly aware of the chilly winds ranging the slope and of her own skimpy clothing. She shivered, cursing quietly but miserably at the thought of spending a night in the open. She and her companions had been spoiled by the room-temperature ambience of the unfinished land.
She clambered a short way back up the hill, then stood to have a look around before the light began to fail. The fog that clung to the ground had mounted higher. Her friends could have passed only a stone's throw away while she slept without noticing her.
When she turned her head, she thought she could hear the river not too far away, invisible in some fold of the hill. She began to move sideways along the hillside toward the sound, leaning into the angle of the slope as her feet searched for solid earth. She could at least be grateful, since she had no shoes, that the hill was more soft dirt than sharp stones.
The river remained elusive. In fact, she couldn't see anything that looked like the low, rolling country she had just left.
Lost. And it's getting dark fast.
She had paused to catch her breath on a shelf of rock when she heard the strange sound. The wind had died, but a thin howl still skirled along the hilltop above her, a kind of drawn-out bubbling whistle. The skin at the back of Renie's neck tightened. When a second wailing noise arose from a spot ahead of her and distinctly farther down the slope, her unease curdled into fear. The first voice seemed to hear it and reply, keening and gobbling like some sort of underwater hyena, and Renie's heart stuttered in her chest.
There was no time to analyze—she knew only that she did not want to be caught between whatever these two things were. She turned and scrambled back across the hillside, missing footholds in the diminishing light so that twice she came very close to a long and perhaps mortal fall.
Just move, keep moving. . . . She had a strange and inexplicable certainty that whatever entities moaned along the slopes above and behind her were not just making noise for its own sake, but were hunting for . . . something. For Renie herself, if she was extremely unlucky. Or perhaps for anything warm that moved, which wasn't a lot better.
The chill wind numbed her skin, enabling her to ignore the countless scratches and bumps of her awkward clamber, but she could feel the cold sucking the strength out of her as well and knew she could not keep up such a pace for long. The cry of the thing on the hilltop seemed farther away now, but the answering moan was at least as loud as before if not louder; Renie chanced a look back and then wished she hadn't. Something pale was moving along the hillside as though following her tracks.
Barely visible through the murk, it flapped and billowed like a man in a bedsheet, but seemed larger than that and much more terrifyingly alien. Unstable shadows moved across its ghostly surface—a horrible suggestion of a face, swimming in and out of focus. As she stared, transfixed, a dark uneven hole opened in the middle of the features to emit the mournful, bubbling cry. As the thing on top of the hill responded, farther away but not by any means far enough for her to head upslope, Renie bolted forward along the hillside, sacrificing caution for speed. The sound of the pursuers filled her with icy dread. Anything, even tumbling to her death down the hill, would be better than being caught by such pale, formless things.
She nearly got her wish when she plunged her foot through a mat of fallen branches that she thought was solid ground. She lost her balance, swung her arms for a moment, then fell and began to roll. Only sheer luck saved her—a tree, bent almost double by years of wind and gnarled as an old man's hand, stood right in her path. As she freed herself from the tangling branches, scratched bloody in a dozen places, another throbbing cry floated up, but it sounded more distant now.
A moment's fierce joy at the idea that she had rolled so far down was suddenly dashed when she realized that this noise came from below her—a third hunter. In confirmation, two more calls echoed from the slope above her head, rising in pitch as though they sensed the end of their run, their quarry's failing strength.
Renie crouched, gasping shallowly, full of useless, terrified thoughts. They had surrounded her—perhaps from pure brute instinct, perhaps because they had planned to do so from the start. She was caught between them now: already she thought she could see the nearest, a wan, deathly shape only a little thicker than the mist, bobbing leglessly along the slope like a jellyfish in an ocean current, moving slowly but inexorably toward her. Her heart was thumping like a high-speed rhythm track.
She realized she was clutching at the lighter and pulled it out of her thin garment. It was useless, but even so she was desperate to hear a voice, any voice. She suddenly couldn't imagine what danger she had thought so great that she had avoided using it before.
"Hello, M–Martine, a–a–anyone?" Fear was taking her breath; she could barely speak. "Is someone listening? Please, answer me?" Silence—even the spectral searchers had fallen still. As she tried the command sequence again, all Renie could see was swirling mist, gray tree-shadows. "Martine? I heard you before—can you hear me now?"
The
voice that came back was diminished but surprisingly clear, so much so that Renie felt a moment of pointless hope, as though her friends might only be a few meters distant, might suddenly come rushing out of the fog to rescue her. "Renie? Is that you? Renie? We hear you. Talk to us."
"Jesus Mercy," Renie said quietly. "It's you, Martine." She struggled for composure—it was almost certain her friends could do nothing for her now. She must tell them what she could, tell them what she had seen and experienced, "We never left the mountain," she began. "We woke up and you were gone. We're in what must be the White Ocean the others talked about. But I've lost !Xabbu and Sam and now I'm lost, too."
". . . Can't understand you very well," Martine replied. "Where are you exactly?"
She was nowhere. She was in the realms of terror. She had to force herself to remember what she had thought about so long. "I think . . . oh, God, I think we're in the heart of the system." The tears started again. "But I'm in trouble—bad trouble. . . !"
Something crackled in the branches behind her. Renie leaped in startled terror and dropped the lighter.
Second:
GHOST SONGS
"Boys and girls come out to play.
The moon is shining as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep,
And join your playfellows in the street."
-Traditional
CHAPTER 11
Yours Very Sincerely
* * *
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