by Tad Williams
The Stone Girl led her out beyond the village and along the valley floor. Renie saw more dark shapes clinging to the hillsides on either side, the shuttered dwellings of another settlement, leaking light between curtains or sparking from the chimneys, but whether they were more shoes or other articles of clothing she could not tell.
"So where is this tree?" she asked after they had walked for perhaps a quarter of an hour beneath the intrusive but oddly benign moon.
"In the Wood."
"But I thought you said you went looking for it before and it wasn't there."
"It wasn't. The Wood was gone."
"Gone?" Renie pulled up. "Hold on, then where are we going? I don't want to walk all night—I want to find my friends!" The thought that she might be putting distance between herself and !Xabbu, or that worse, he might be out in this same moon-domed night just a short distance away, gave her a fierce, sudden ache. She had been trying not to think about him but it was a precarious sort of ignorance, fragile as a bubble.
The Stone Girl turned to face her, arms akimbo, stubby hands on hips. "If you want answers, you have to come and make a Witch. If you want to find the Witching Tree, you have to find the Wood."
"It . . . it moves?"
Her guide could only shake her head. "I don't understand you. I'm trying to help. Do you want to come with me or not?" There was a pleading note beneath the fierceness.
A sudden idea struck Renie. "Could you make a map? Maybe that would help me understand." She reached down and found a stick, then scratched a line in the dirt—bold, so it would show on the moonlit ground. "Okay, that's the road we just came down. See, I'll draw some shoes to be the houses. These are the hills. And here we are now. Now can you make a picture of where we're going?"
The Stone Girl looked down at the ground for a long moment, then up at Renie, squinting her pockmark eyes as though against a fierce sun. "Before I met you," she asked with a certain delicacy, "did you sort of . . . fall down? Maybe on your head?"
By the time they had reached the thick, scrubby slopes that the Stone Girl said marked the outskirts of the Wood, Renie had begun to realize how impossible the whole thing really was. There would be no map, either for this journey or any other such trip Renie might want to make. Apparently, there were no such thing as maps in this place, and for a very good reason.
It looks like there's just not much normal here-to-there proximity, she decided. I should have thought of it. The human-built simulations are made to be navigated by humans just like they were part of the real world. But why should a machine intelligence try to duplicate something like physical proximity or geographical continuity that it never uses or experiences itself?
As far as she could tell, some things like the villages did have implied maps, or at least a sort of three-dimensional organization and stability that allowed the inhabitants to find their way around their home turf, but once you left the familiar locale there were apparently no memorized routes to other places within the world, even it the inhabitants had visited those places before.
In fact, the Stone Girl had been coping bravely with what Renie now realized must seem very strange, fundamentally wrong questions. "You just . . . find the Wood," she explained again. "It's always in front of you until you walk for the right amount of time, then you look for things."
"Things like . . . what? Shapes? Trees you've seen before?"
The Stone Girl shrugged. "Just . . . things that seem like the Wood is somewhere near. Like that." She pointed to a vertical stone thrusting from the hillside undergrowth, illuminated by the huge moon.
"That rock?" The finger of pale stone was the size of a truck—certainly a fairly obvious landmark. "You've seen that before, then?"
Her guide shook her head in frustration. "No. There are lots of rocks like that. But tonight it's a close-to-the-Wood kind of rock."
Now Renie was the one reduced to headshaking. Clearly her companion had knowledge she didn't—perhaps transmitted cues that Renie could not receive, or even precoded information being translated as spontaneous recognitions. Whatever it was, Renie didn't understand it. And if it was something precoded, she would never understand it.
As the Stone Girl led her uphill through the scrub growth, Renie pulled the blanket tight around her to protect herself from scratches and tried to imagine what it felt like to live in such a world. But how can I hope to make sense of it? I can't even imagine what it feels like to grow up the way !Xabbu did, to see normal urban life as something strange, and he's a living, breathing person like me, not an artificial construct.
The sharpness of her separation from him came back, this time with a helplessness she hadn't felt before. Is it pointless anyway? she wondered. I feel so strongly for him, I'm so scared we won't make it out of this together—but what then? Even if we survive, how could we have a life together? We're so different. I don't know anything about his background, his people's lives, except the few things he's told me. What would his family think of me?
Renie's steps slowed as her spirits sagged. She forced her thoughts in a different direction.
I still don't know whether or not the people in this world—the Stone Girl, Weeweekee—are really the missing children. But it certainly seems possible. Maybe the Other brought them all here, their consciousnesses, their minds, whatever. She felt a shiver that was not caused by the cool of the night air. Their souls.
And if Stephen is here in this world, how can I find him? How will I recognize him? Would he even know me?
"The Wood is just beginning." Her companion came a little way back down the slope. "This is a bad place to stop—Jinnears, and maybe some Ticks, too, they all like it here on the edges."
"Do you know. . . ." Renie could hardly think of what she wanted to ask. "Do you remember being . . . having a life before this?"
"Before what?"
"Before you lived in the shoe, with the stepmother. Do you remember anything else? Crossing a white ocean? Having a mother or a father?"
The Stone Girl was puzzled and clearly a little worried. "I remember lots of things from before the shoe. Of course I crossed the White Ocean. Who didn't?" She frowned. "But a mother? No. People talk about a mother, but nobody has one." She suddenly became very solemn; the dark holes that were her eyes grew wide. "Where you come from . . . do people have mothers?"
"Some do, yes." She thought of her own, lost so long ago. "Some lucky ones do."
"What do they look like? Are they bigger than stepmothers, or smaller?" Renie had finally struck a topic that interested her companion. "This boy who used to live in the Shoes, but then he went away, he said he remembered a mother, a real one, one that was just his." Her indignant snort was not entirely convincing. "Bragger, we called him."
Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to make sense of what little information she'd put together. "Do you all come here as birds? Are you all birds to begin with?"
The Stone Girl laughed loudly, a surprising sound in the evening dark. "All birds? You mean everyone, the people in the Shoes, in the Coats, the people at Bang Very Cross and Long Done Bridge? How could there be so many birds?" She leaned down and poked Renie in the arm. "Now come on. Like I said, there's usually Jinnears out." Renie realized that beginning to make some sense of this world would mean little if they were caught out-of-doors by one of those terrifying creatures. "Okay. Let's keep moving."
Like everything else she had seen since finding the black mountain, the Wood was both more and less than reality. A few paces in from the perimeter the trees grew very thickly and seemed to share branches, as though the whole upper forest was a tangled mat of one single growth spread miles wide. Some did not grow so high, but branched sideways farther than any real tree would, like vast green mushrooms covering hundreds of meters. Many of the freestanding shrubs had definite shapes to them, rounded forms as regular as the icons of playing cards, spades and clubs and diamonds, as though the tangled woodland were the preserve of a fanatical corps of topiary gardeners.<
br />
Although the high canopy blocked out most of the great blue-white disk overhead, small, warm lights now kindled in the overhead branches as if to replace the lost moonlight. These individually weak lights grew more and more dense until the forest was brighter than the hillside they had climbed, an endless twinkling bower like a gigantic Christmas display.
"What are those shining things?"
"Bugs," the Stone Girl told her. "Wood-candles, we call 'em. They're like the candle Weeweekee has, but smaller."
Will-o'-the-Wisps, Renie thought, that's what they should be called. Whatever those things are that used to lure travelers off the path. They're beautiful. You could follow these lights forever.
"We're close to the Witching Tree now." The Stone Girl spoke quietly, as if the tree were something that might be spooked into flight.
But maybe it is, Renie thought. Who can know around here? She had begun to formulate a guess as to what the thing might actually be. "This Witching Tree," she said. "What do we do when we find it?"
"Make a witch, of course."
"Ah." The weird mangling of Wee Willie Winkie into Weeweekee had not escaped her—the Other seemed to have an idiosyncratic grasp of spoken English, almost childlike in its misunderstandings. She was being taken to a Wishing Tree, "You tell it what you want, is that right?"
The Stone Girl considered. "I guess."
They were deep in the Wood now, the swirl of tiny lights illuminating not just the arabesque of branches over their heads but also open places in the thickening forest, long vistas of lighted tunnel, paths that bent out of sight and vanished. A mist rising from the ground softened the gleaming points to something out of a sentimental winter scene, a holiday card. The memory that had been nagging at Renie for hours finally rose to the surface.
This is like that place under that horrible club—Mister J's. Where those strange people, those children or whatever they were, took !Xabbu. She thought back on the Brothers-Grimmish ceiling of roots, the pinpoint lights, the sensation of being tightly enclosed even in a wide space. All of this invented country had that feel—as yearningly claustrophobic as a beautiful clipper ship constructed inside a bottle.
The Other made that place, too, she suddenly felt certain, even though it was in the real world-net, not the Grail network. A little . . . what, shelter? Refuge? Something it created for itself inside that ghastly place. So the children there—Corduroy, Wicket, I can't remember all their names—were they children like the ones here? Stolen children?
There was some key to the Other's personality to be found in comparing the two, she suddenly felt sure, if "personality" was the right word. Some recurring theme in what it made for itself. Something that might actually benefit from an applied use of Renie's engineering smarts.
If I ever get the chance for uninterrupted thought. . . .
"There it is," announced the Stone Girl. "The Witching Tree."
Renie's first thought was that she had stumbled onto another case of complete communication failure, because what lay before her where the forest opened out was not a tree at all, but a wide expanse of dark water, a lake or large pond. It took her a moment even to be sure of that, because although the moon hung in the sky just above, big and bright as some alien mothership preparing to land, there was no reflection of it in the water: except for a crowd of smaller lights gleaming beneath the surface, the lake might have been a huge black hole in the forest floor.
Renie moved forward, squinting as though studying a dusty mirror. The lights in the water were not points like the wood-candles, but something more like active waveforms, shimmers of faint purple and silver that were either moving swiftly or turning on and off in sequence. She lowered herself to a crouch and stared at the hypnotic movement of light in the blackness, then stretched out a hand to the dark water.
"Don't!" the Stone Girl said. "We don't go in it. We have to go around it."
"Why? What are those lights?"
Her companion wrapped small cool fingers around Renie's arm. "They're just . . . they just belong there. Don't you want to go to the tree?"
Renie allowed herself to be drawn upright. "I thought you said it was here."
"No, silly. It's over there. Can't you see it?"
Renie followed the girl's gesture. Halfway around the lake,, something a good bit larger than the surrounding vegetation loomed over the riverbank, half-sunk in the water like a giant cooling its feet. It was hard to see it clearly: the other trees wore their crowns of sparkling fairy-lights, and the water itself was alive with glimmers of faint color, but the thing the Stone Girl pointed at was dark.
As they waded along the spongy lakeshore, Renie could not shake the idea that the lights in the water were following them like curious fish, but she could not be sure it wasn't merely her own changing vantage point. She leaned over and violently waved a hand over the water, half-expecting the lights to startle back, but if the dull gleams were some kind of creatures, they were not much impressed.
Of all the unlikely shapes of living things Renie had encountered since entering this simworld, the Witching Tree seemed the poorest copy of a real-world object. It was scarcely a tree at all: only its roughly vertical middle section, which might have been a trunk, and the way it flared at the bottom and the top, seemed to fit the bill. Its hide was shiny and smooth but for the places it wrinkled at the bends of branch and root, resembling the skin of some black dolphin more than it did bark. At the end of their forking subdivisions the limbs disappeared among the branches of other, more normal looking trees; the rubbery black roots dangled in the murky water like the tentacles of an octopus dragged halfway onto land. The thing gave an impression of not quite belonging, a piece of alien life dropped into the environment.
Considering how weird everything else is around here, that's saying a lot, she decided, "Are you sure that's . . . a tree?"
The Stone Girl frowned. "It's the Witching Tree. Do they look different where you come from?"
Renie could think of no useful reply to that. "What do we do?"
"We make a witch and ask a question." She looked at Renie expectantly. "Do you want to go first?"
"I have no idea what to do." Something about this strange, lonely spot suddenly made her aware of how tired and used-up she felt. "I'll just watch you, for now."
The Stone Girl nodded. She rucked up her shapeless dress and sat on the ground, composing herself. Then, in a dry and touchingly off-key voice, she began to sing unfamiliar words to a familiar melody.
"Hush-a-bye, baby,
Your cradle is green,
Daddy's a king,
And Mommy's a queen;
Sister's a lady
Who wears a gold ring;
Brother's a drummer
Who plays for the king."
In the moment's silence that followed, Renie thought she saw a slowing and dimming of the flashes in the dark water, but the tree itself, as if it were somehow absorbing the light, began softly to glow, the merest hint of a rich grape-skin purple beneath the Witching Tree's smooth black rind. It creaked and shuddered. For a frightened instant Renie thought the tree was going to stand up on its roots like some nightmare vision, but it was the branches that were slowly bending. Something came rustling down from the heights where it had been hidden in the foliage of the surrounding trees—a fruit that glowed like a lantern with a deep, fleshy red shine, dangling at the end of a long black branch.
The Stone Girl reached up her small hands and let the fruit nestle in her palms. She gave a small sharp twist; when the twig snapped free, the black branch sprang back into the heights. The Stone Girl looked up at Renie, her smiling face bathed in strawberry-colored light, her dimple-eyes round. Although she had been expecting it, the little girl's expression clearly said, it was nevertheless a thing of wonder.
The sparkle in the surrounding trees grew dimmer, so that the fruit, an ovoid about the size and shape of an eggplant, seemed now to be the brightest light. Renie found herself leaning forward as
the Stone Girl clutched the glowing object firmly and split it in half.
A tiny shape lay at the center of the fruit—a baby, or something shaped like a baby, its shrunken body markedly female, the eyes closed as if in sleep. Its hands were laid across its stomach, the little fingers translucent as threads of glass.
"I made a Witch!" the Stone Girl whispered, thrilled and a little scared. The infant thing wriggled in its glowing bed at the sound of her voice.
"A . . . witch. . . ." Renie fought against the dreamy illogic of the scene. She had thought it a simple mispronunciation, but clearly it was more, somehow.
The Stone Girl held up the homunculus, cradling it close to her chest so that she nearly touched it with her lips as she asked her questions. "Will the Ending come any closer?"
The little thing stirred again. When it spoke, eyes still firmly shut, the voice was eerily out of keeping with the infant form, a lost moan that seemed to echo across great distances.
". . . Ending . . . is only beginning. . . ."
"But what will happen to us when all the world is gone into the Ending? Where will we live?"
The tiny mouth curled in a half-smile, then the Witch began to sing. "Boys and girls come out to play, the moon is shining as bright as day. . . ."
Renie fought down a superstitious shudder. Despite the small, ghostly voice, the entire fantastic setting, this was something that existed for a reason—or at least its creator had once operated under direction and intention. It might be weirdly unsettling to listen to the murmuring pronouncements of what was essentially a machine, but she had too much at stake to be tricked into forgetting. Underneath all this hoodoo ran the binary blood of a comprehensible system: she was not going to be sidetracked by what was little more than game design gone badly astray.
The Witch in the Stone Girl's hand had begun to wither, shriveling into a wrinkled mass like the stone of a peach. Grotesquely, it continued to talk and sing, but the voice had grown so faint now that although the Stone Girl was still listening intently, Renie could no longer make out any of the words. After a while it became clear that even the Stone Girl could not hear it anymore; she stared at it sadly for a moment, then dropped it unceremoniously into the dark, unreflecting water.