by Tad Williams
VO: Visitors to the virtual adults-only club Limousine got a surprise when service was interrupted for almost an hour by what some users suggest was a disguised or artificial voice reciting nursery rhymes.
(visual: anonymated Limousine customer)
CUSTOMER: "Yeah, it sounds funny, but really it was pretty gruesome. I mean, it didn't sound . . . normal."
VO: Happy Juggler, the corporation that owns Limousine and several other online clubs, call it "just the most recent in a series of irritating pranks."
(visual: Jean-Pierre Michaux, HJN Corporation spokesperson)
MICHAUX: "It prevented us delivering service in our most productive time slots, and also, let's face it, half our users are fathers and even some mothers who've finally put the kids to bed and are hoping for a little diversion and relaxation. Nobody in that situation wants to have to sit and listen to more damn nursery rhymes."
Jeremiah stacked the last vacuum bag and stood surveying his handiwork. It wasn't quite a kitchen—who was he fooling, it was nothing like a kitchen—but it would have to do. Piles of cans, boxes, and bags of rations, several plastic jugs of water, the single working portable halogen ring he'd salvaged from one of the upstairs common rooms, a kettle, and about three weeks' supply—if they were stingy with it—of perhaps the most precious commodity of all, instant coffee. Trapped in the underground base without any of the real stuff, he had long since taught himself to drink the self-heating swill without gagging, and had even begun to look forward to his morning cup. Now he was even more anxious to preserve a few last rituals of normality.
He squinted at his makeshift larder, which filled most of an upright metal cabinet. All in all, it would serve. And if they were to be trapped down in this lowest level so long the coffee ran out, well, then perhaps the thugs upstairs wouldn't seem such a bad alternative.
He couldn't even make himself smile. He checked the batteries in his flashlight, firmed up the corners of one of his stacks, and stood.
Good Lord, I am a walking stereotype. Under siege, fighting for our lives, and who promptly takes over the kitchen as mother-elect?
He made his way around the circular walkway to the control consoles where Del Ray sat frowning at the screen like a literary critic forced to review cheap genre fiction. Long Joseph lurked sullenly behind him, two squeeze bottles of wine sitting on the table. Jeremiah felt a moment of actual pity for the man. If Jeremiah himself was feeling miserable about having to ration several weeks' worth of coffee, imagine how Joseph must feel about having to make a day's worth or less of his usual poison last for God alone knew how long?
"How is it going?" he asked.
Del Ray shrugged. "I can't get the security monitors to work. They should, but they don't. I warned you, this is not really my area of expertise. How's your end?"
"As good as it's going to get." Jeremiah pulled out one of the swivel chairs and sat down. "I wish we'd had that old fellow Singh get those cameras all running when we had the chance. But who knew we'd need them?"
"Maybe your friend Sellars will call back," said Del Ray, but he didn't sound like he believed it. He pushed one of the buttons on the console, then gave it a frustrated whack. "Maybe he can do something about this disaster."
"My Renie was here, she would have that wired up before you can jump and turn around," Long Joseph said suddenly. "She know all that stuff. Has a degree from the university and all."
Del Ray glowered, but it quirked unexpectedly into a tiny smile. "Yes, she would. And she'd get a lot of pleasure cleaning up the mess I've made with it and telling me about it."
"She would. She is one smart girl. Ought to be, with all that money for her education."
Del Ray's smile widened a bit as he met Jeremiah's gaze. Education she paid for herself, if I remember correctly, Jeremiah thought. He remembered Renie talking about her years of bondage to the university dining hall.
"Hang on a moment," he said, turning to Joseph. "Did I hear correctly? Were you bragging about Renie?"
"What do you mean, bragging?" Joseph asked suspiciously.
"I mean, acting like you're actually proud of her?"
The older man scowled. "Proud of her? 'Course I am proud of her. She is a smart girl, like her mama was."
Jeremiah almost shook his head in wonderment. He wondered if the man had ever said anything like that when Renie was around to hear it, instead of waiting until she was encased in plasmodal gel in the depths of a fibramic casket. Somehow he doubted it.
"Damn." Del Ray pushed his chair back from the console. "I give up. I can't fix it. This waiting is making me crazy. I thought that at least if we could see what they're doing up there, instead of just sitting here. . . ."
"You don't want all those cameras," Joseph growled. "That will do no good against bad men like those. I told you, we should be finding guns to shoot those piglockers with."
Jeremiah grunted in exasperation. "There aren't any guns. You know that already. Nobody's going to decommission a military base and leave the guns lying around."
Joseph hooked a thumb toward Del Ray, who was slumped in his chair, staring up at the ceiling of the vast underground chamber as though trying to do the work of the inactive monitors by himself. "He have a gun. I told you, you should give that gun to me. You didn't see him, waving it around, all in a fright, hand so sweaty I thought he might shoot my head off just by accident."
"Not this again," Jeremiah moaned.
"I'm just telling you! I don't think this mother's boy ever fired a gun at all! I was in the Defense Force, you know."
"Oh, yes," said Del Ray, eyes still closed, "I'm sure you shot a lot of other people's chickens after you and your mates had downed a few." He rubbed at his face. "Even if it wasn't hand-coded for me, you'd be the last person I'd. . . . "
The sudden silence was strange. Jeremiah was just about to ask Del Ray if he was all right when the young man abruptly sat upright in his chair, eyes wide.
"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God!"
"What is it?" Jeremiah asked.
"The gun!" Del Ray grabbed at his hair as though he would pull it from his scalp. "The gun! It's in my jacket pocket!"
"So?"
"I left it upstairs! When I was stacking water bottles yesterday. I was hot. I took the damn thing off, then when I got downstairs you asked me about the cameras, and . . . shit!" He stood up, his hand still on his head as though he was afraid it might otherwise tumble from his shoulders.
"See. . . ?" Joseph began, unable to disguise his pleased tone, but Jeremiah rounded on him.
"Don't say anything." He turned back to Del Ray. "Where is it? The kitchen?"
Del Ray nodded miserably.
"Do we really need it?" Jeremiah looked around. "I mean, once they are down here, is it any real use to us?"
"Is it any real use?" Del Ray stared at him. "What if they get in here? Are we going to throw bags of flour at them? We need every advantage we have. I have to go get it."
"You can't. We closed off the elevator—shut those armored security doors like Sellars told us to do. There's no other way up. And we are not going to take the chance of opening them again."
Del Ray stood looking at the floor for a moment, then straightened, some of the panic suddenly gone from his face. "Hold on. I don't think I left it in the kitchen after all. I think I just left it outside the elevator on the top floor of our part of the base. I stored most of the water bottles and the extra generator up there, and I think that's where I took my jacket off."
"I will get it," said Long Joseph brightly, but both men turned on him.
"Shut up."
"Yes, shut up, Joseph."
Del Ray started off toward the stairs. "It's too bad we had to seal off the elevator at both ends—it would be nice if we could keep it to use just down here for dragging stuff up and down."
"Too noisy," Jeremiah called after him. "If we are lucky, they won't even know there are more rooms down here." He suddenly realized how loud his voice was.
Too noisy, you say, and listen to you! What if they're up there with stethoscopes or something, listening to the floor, looking for us. . . .
The idea of the faceless mercenaries—Jeremiah alone of the three had not seen them—crawling along the floor, tapping on the concrete like woodpeckers, was deeply disturbing.
We don't even know they're inside, he told himself. Maybe they can't get through that big front door, like a bank's vault. It took Renie and her hacker friends at least this long to get it open.
Still, the vision would not go away. He looked at Joseph, who was sucking a measured amount of Mountain Rose with a face full of wounded dignity, and decided he had better find something with which to keep himself occupied.
Del Ray had levered open the console and its array of security monitors, revealing a mare's nest of cables that looked like something from an ancient telephone switchboard. Jeremiah sat in the chair the younger man had vacated and meditatively flicked switches. The console had power—all the monitor screens had little red lights glowing beneath them—but the screens themselves were blackly empty.
Joseph was right. If Renie was here she'd have this running in a few minutes.
He tugged at the bundle of cables. All but a few were connected. He took one of those that wasn't and tried it in a few of the open slots, but nothing changed. A second provided nothing different, but as he pulled up the third another came tangled with it, and as it brushed something in the board, the screens momentarily hiccuped with light, then went black again.
Excited, Jeremiah pulled the end of the trailing cable free and began to touch it to the open connections in succession. Suddenly the monitors jumped into life again. Jeremiah attached the cable, warm with pride. Now they could see outside their bunker. They were no longer forced to wait blindly.
Before he could tell Long Joseph of his triumph, something caught Jeremiah's attention. One of the monitors displayed a rectangle of trees and scrub brush, framed by blackness. Puzzled, he stared at it for long moments before he realized what he was seeing.
It was the base's massive front gate, seen from a camera just inside. The gate was open.
Three loud cracks came from somewhere above Jeremiah's head. Long Joseph leaped up, swearing, so startled that he dropped his squeeze bottle of wine to the floor. Jeremiah's skin turned cold.
"Del Ray!" he shouted. "Del Ray, is that you?"
For once Joseph kept his mouth shut as they both listened. Nothing came to them but the echo of Jeremiah's own voice.
"Is he shooting that gun?" asked Joseph in a hoarse, nervous whisper. "Or someone shooting at him?"
Jeremiah felt as though his own cry had emptied all the air from his chest: he could only shake his head. For a moment he stood, frightened and confused, trying to decide whether they should shut off the lights and hide. He turned to the console and tried to make sense of the almost monochrome images, seeing what he thought were flickers of movement here or there, but never able to make out anything definitive.
Which one shows upstairs, where Del Ray went?
He recognized the elevator bay at last—not by the elevator itself, which was only a dark shadow along the wall, but because of the old sign posted beside it, a stern warning about the weight the elevator could handle that he had seen so many times he sometimes found himself muttering it under his breath.
He only had time to think, for the very first time in all the weeks he had been immured in the underground base, Seems funny that there is no freight elevator for a place with this much equipment, then he saw the dim outline of a pair of legs stretched on the floor, disappearing offscreen. It was too dark to be absolutely sure, but Jeremiah knew with an indisputable horror whose legs and feet those were, lying so still beside the darkness of the elevator door.
Dear Mr. Ramsey,
The first time you walked into my house, I thought you were a very nice man. I know it may not have seemed that way, that I may have seemed suspicious. Just listening to me without letting your thoughts show on your face was a kind thing to do, because I am sure you must have thought I was a crazy old woman.
When you read what I have to tell you now, you will be very certain that you were right. I don't mind. When I started to get old, I used to feel bad because men didn't look at me the same way any more, that I wasn't a young girl. I was never pretty, but I was young once, and men do look. When if stopped I felt a little bad, but I thought at least they will take me seriously now. Then when all the things happened to me, the headaches and the problems and my ideas about this Tandagore disease, people stopped even looking at me like I had a brain in my head. But you treated me like a real person. You are a nice man, I was right about you.
I am doing something that is hard to explain and if I am wrong I will wind up in a jail somewhere. If I am right, I will probably be killed. It is a long distance to go to prove a point, I bet you are saying.
But this letter is to tell you that if I am crazy, it doesn't feel like it to me, and that I am doing this with the knowledge that it doesn't seem to make sense. But if you heard the voices I hear in my head, or that I used to hear, you would do what I am doing too. I know you would, because I can tell what kind of man you are.
Before I tell you the other things, that reminds me of something I wanted to say to you. I feel very light now, as if I have taken off a heavy coat and am walking through the snow. Later I may freeze, but for now I am just happy to have that heavy weight off my back. The weight is pretending, you see, and instead I am telling the truth. So I will tell you something that I would never have said to you otherwise. You should get married. You are a good man who works too hard, always in your office, never at your home. I know you will say, what is this crazy old Polish-Russian lady talking about, but you need to find someone to share your life with. I don't even know if you like men or women, and you know what? It doesn't matter to me. But find someone to live with you, that you want to go home for. If you can, have children. Somehow children make sense out of life.
Now I will tell you the rest, about the voices and about Obolos Corporation and Felix Jongleur. Then even if you still think I am crazy, you will understand why I am doing what I am doing. I am telling you just so that someone knows it.
Do you know, if my baby had lived, he would have been just about your age? I think about things like that too much.
And when I have finished explaining there will only be one more thing for you to do. I think there is something called a power of attorney? And since you are an attorney, you would know about this. If I disappear, then please will you sell my things? Mostly only small things and not worth the trouble,-but there is Obolos stock and my house. I have no living relatives and that stock now feels to me like something unclean—"treyf," as my mother would have said. Will you sell them both, please, and give the money to the children's hospital in Toronto?
I am sitting here at this desk, looking at this screen, and it is very hard to find a place to begin to explain. The voices had not come to me when you and I first met. If they are just something in my own head, something to do with the headache, then I will have made a fool of myself. But you know what? I don't care. There are children hurting, both those with the terrible coma disease and I think maybe others too—the voices who speak to me. It is for the children I must risk it. If I am wrong it is only one more old woman locked away. If I am right, no one will believe me, not even you, but at least I will have tried to do something.
The voices, and now the black tower. It is like a castle from one of my mother's stories. It frightens me very much. But I will go there and I will get inside and I will try to find the truth. . . .
". . . And it ends, 'Yours very sincerely, Olga Pirofsky,' " Ramsey finished.
Kaylene Sorensen broke the silence. "That poor woman!"
"That poor woman, indeed." Sellars leaned forward, eyes half shut. He had rolled his wheelchair back into the most shadowed corner of the room, but even the small amount of sunlight arrowing in benea
th the drapes seemed to make him uncomfortable. "She's brave, though. She is walking into the lion's den."
"You don't think they'll really kill her, do you?" Ramsey's hands were still shaking; Olga's letter had disturbed him deeply. "That wouldn't be very smart of them. Surely if they catch her trespassing on J Corporation property they'll just toss her out, maybe have her arrested?"
Sellars shook his head sadly. "If Jongleur and his associates had nothing to hide, that would certainly be the case. But do you think your client will go quietly if they do catch her? Or will she make loud claims that will attract more attention than a trespasser usually gets?" He sighed. "Here is another question. What can she tell them about you?"
"What?" Ramsey was caught unprepared. "I don't get you."
"If this mess is everything he claims it is," Major Sorensen interjected, "then Sellars is right—they'll question her. And if they're that ugly, they will get information. You don't want to think about that part too much, but trust me—you saw the kind of boys General Yacoubian was running around with. What does she know about you, Ramsey . . . about . . . all this?"
Catur Ramsey suddenly noticed that his heart was racing. He took a step backward and sank into one of the shiny metal chairs. The cheap servo-motors tried to adjust the seat to fit him, but gave up about halfway through the process. "Christ."
"What I don't get, though," Sorensen continued, "is all this crap about 'voices.' Is it like you talking to my daughter and to me, Sellars? Is someone tricking her? Or is she just . . . well, you know . . . nuts?"
"I don't know," the old man said. He looked as troubled as Ramsey felt. "But I suspect it is something stranger and more complicated than either."
"Good Lord, we have to stop her!" Ramsey shoved himself to the edge of the chair, prompting a whine of indignation from the internal mechanism. "We can't just let her walk into that, whether she's a risk to me or not. I didn't have a chance to tell her half the things I'd found out. I don't know about these voices either, but somehow she's stumbled into this thing—completely separate from you, Sellars. all on her own—and she still thinks she might be imagining it." He thought about it and slumped back. "God, the poor woman."