by Tad Williams
"Will the tree work for me, too?" Renie asked.
The Stone Girl seemed disturbed, but not by the question. "Suppose so."
Renie seated herself on the ground beside the girl. She couldn't remember the words the Stone Girl had sung. "Can you help me sing?"
Her small companion prompted her with the unfamiliar words about kings and queens, and Renie followed along, trying to make up for her hesitation between lines with clarity and volume. When she had finished, the air around the lake fell silent. A wind, perhaps, moved the branches of the trees so that the lights wavered. After a moment the branches of the dark tree began to move again: one of the shining, globular fruits was gliding down to her out of the hidden spaces overhead.
As she cradled the warm, smooth thing in her hands and tugged at it, watched it split open like a biology illustration to reveal the little creature within, Renie had a brief but powerful flash of memory. The childish solemnity of the experience, the crude images of death and birth, brought back to her the games she used to play with her friend Nomsa—elaborate, mock-Egyptian funerals of dolls, somber ceremonies out behind the flatblock where the weeds would hide them from mothers they somehow knew would disapprove. This was much the same, another flirtation with the forbidden that seemed not quite adult.
The miniature infant opened its eyes, startling her back to the present.
"Too late. . . ." it said, the voice airy with distance. "Too late . . . the children are dying . . . the old children and the new children. . . ."
Renie found herself growing angry, although she was a little distracted to realize that her baby was male. "What do you mean, 'too late?' That's a lot of shit, after everything we've been through." She looked to the Stone Girl. "Don't I get to ask it a question?"
Her companion was watching the baby's eyes, which filled the lids like pearls, without irises or pupils. The Stone Girl seemed frightened about something and did not answer, so Renie turned back to the strange fruit,
"Look, I think I know what you are, and I think I may even understand a little of what is going on." Renie was not sure if she was addressing the homunculus, the tree, the air. It's like talking to God, she decided. Although this one goes out of its way to communicate. Sort of. "Just tell me what you want from us. Are we supposed to find you? Was that what the black mountain was all about?"
Tiny limbs twitched slowly. "Wanted . . . the children . . . safe. . . ." It flailed again, as though drowning in a deep, unfriendly dream. "The new children . . . nowhere to be. . . . Now the cold. . . ."
"What about the children? Why don't you just let them go?"
"Hurts. Going to fall. Then warm . . . for a little while. . . ." Terrifyingly, the small perfect mouth opened wide and a rhythmic, wheezing hiss filled the air. Renie could not tell if it was laughter or gasping misery; either way, it was a horrible sound.
"Just tell us what you want! Why did you take the children—my brother Stephen, all the others? How can we get them back?"
The noise had ended. The tiny arms moved more slowly. The homunculus was becoming loose and flabby, collapsing in on itself in dreadful, high-speed putrefaction.
". . . Set free. . . ." The voice was a whisper that barely reached her ears. ". . . Set . . . free. . . ."
"God damn you!" Renie shouted. "Come back and talk to me!" But whatever had spoken was silent. Renie tried to remember the song that had summoned it, but the words were a jumble in her head, adding chaos to the rising anger. It was like dealing with Stephen at his most truculent—the child that simply would not obey, who almost dared you to use force. She gave up on the unfamiliar verse and began hoarsely to sing the words she did know, determined to drag the thing back from wherever it was hiding, force it to deal with her.
"Rock-a-bye, baby,
in the treetop,"
The fruit in her hands liquified and ran between her fingers. With a grunt of disgust, Renie threw it down and wiped her hands in the dirt, singing all the while.
"When the wind blows,
the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby,
cradle and all."
"Do you hear me?" she snarled. "Cradle and all, damn it!"
For a long moment there was only silence. Then a whisper, thin as a death-sigh, rose all around her.
"Why . . . hurting? . . . Called you . . . but now . . . too late. . . ."
"Called. . . ? You bastard, you didn't call anyone—you stole my brother!" Anger was bubbling out of her now, confined for too long in too tight a space. "Where is he? God damn you, you tell me where Stephen Sulaweyo is or I'll come find you and take you apart piece by piece. . . !" There was no reply. Furious, she opened her mouth to begin the verse again, to drag the thing back by its metaphorical ear, but was stopped by a sudden convulsive shudder up and down the tree's smooth black trunk—a peristaltic spasm that made the branches whip and snap overhead, knocking leaves and twigs from the other trees even as the black roots stirred the lake to froth.
Then, with the suddenness of a frightened ocean creature retreating into its shell, the tree collapsed—a lightning parody of what had happened to the witch-babies, but unlike them, the tree did not merely shrivel; it shrank from something into literally nothing: one moment it stood before them, the next it was gone, with only the torn, muddy ground and agitated waters to show it had even existed.
The Stone Girl turned to Renie, eyes wide, mouth a dark gape.
"You . . . you killed it," she said. "You killed the Witching Tree!"
CHAPTER 19
The Bravest: Man in the World
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: ANVAC Arrests Own Customer for Noncomptiance
(visual: defendant Vildbjerg's house, Odense, Denmark)
VO: Danish music producer Nalli Vildbjerg was briefly jailed and is being sued by the security corporation ANVAC for violating his contract-failing to notify them of a crime that occurred on the premises they protect.
VILDBJERG: "These people are mad! I had a party, and someone took a coat that didn't belong to them-by accident, I'm certain. These ANVAC madmen saw it on the surveillance, and not only had this person arrested-a guest of mine!-but now they're prosecuting me, too!"
(visual: anonymated attorney from ANVAC's international legal firm, Thurn, Taxis, and Posthorn)
ATTORNEY: "When you sign one of our contracts, it says very clearly on page one hundred and seventeen that all crimes that occur onsite must be immediately and accurately reported to the company. Mr. Vildbjerg does not have the right to ignore crime-to appoint himself judge and jury in a matter of Danish and UN law."
* * *
I'll just remember Orlando, Sam told herself for perhaps the twentieth time in the past few hours. Then I can keep going. She might be stumbling with fatigue and miserable with worry, missing her parents and her home so badly she wanted to scream, but that was nothing compared to what Orlando had shouldered every single day.
But it killed him, she could not help remembering. So what good did it do him being brave, so brave. . . ?
"I think it is time for another rest," !Xabbu said. "We have been walking a long time now."
"And nothing is different," she said bitterly. "Is it just going to be like this forever? It could, couldn't it? Huh? Just go on forever, I mean. It's not a real place."
"I suppose." !Xabbu dropped easily into a crouch, showing no effects from the all-day march that had Sam's legs trembling with fatigue. "But it doesn't seem . . . what is the word? Likely. Logical."
"Logical." She sniffed. "That sounds like Renie."
"It does sound like her," said !Xabbu. "I miss her—always thinking, wondering, trying to make sense of every detail." He looked up at a movement nearby, something cresting the low riverside hill they had just descended. It was Jongleur, trudging after them with that grim tenacity that Sam found almost admirable. His body might be relatively young and healthy, that of a fit middl
e-aged man, but it was clear Jongleur himself had no recent practice in moving such a body for very long and was feeling the endless walk even more than she was.
"I still hate him," Sam said quietly. "I utterly do. But it's hard to, you know, keep it up when you see someone all the time, isn't it?"
!Xabbu did not answer. He and the older man were no longer naked since the Bushman had woven them both a sort of kilt from the long river grasses during their rest stops, and Sam had to admit it made her a little more comfortable. She thought of herself as modern and un-shockable, but it was strange enough having !Xabbu naked all the time, and herself nearly so; to have to confront the raw physical reality of Felix Jongleur for days on end had made her feel like she couldn't quite get clean.
"Not that we have days around here," she said aloud. "Not really."
!Xabbu looked at her curiously.
"Sorry. I was thinking out loud." Sam frowned. "But it's true. It doesn't get dark or light here like a normal place. There's no sun. It's more like someone gets up in the morning and switches on a big light, then turns it off again at night."
"Yes, it is strange. But why should it be anything else? It is not real, after all."
"It's real enough to kill us," said Jongleur as he stopped beside them.
"Thank you, Aardlar the Cheerful Barbarian." Sam only realized after she said it that she was quoting one of Orlando's jokes.
!Xabbu wandered a little way down the riverbank. As Jongleur caught his breath, Sam watched her small, slim friend picking his way through the reeds. He misses her so much, but he doesn't talk about it. He just wants to keep walking, walking, wants to keep looking for her. She tried to imagine what it felt like, tried to picture what she would feel if Orlando were still alive and lost somewhere in this alien landscape, but it made her too sad. At least there's a chance he might find Renie.
"We should go on," !Xabbu called. "It is hard to tell how many hours of light we have."
Jongleur rose without a word of complaint and resumed his plodding march. Sam sped up to catch !Xabbu.
"This place all looks just the same," she said. "Except that sometimes it starts to look . . . I don't know . . . transparent again. Like when we first came here." She pointed to a distant line of hills. "See? They looked okay before, but now they don't look quite real."
!Xabbu nodded his head wearily. "I can make no more sense of things than you."
"How about the other side of the river?" Sam asked, half-hoping to distract him. "Maybe Renie's over there."
"You can see as well as I can that the land is even more flat there," !Xabbu told her. "There are at least some trees and plants by the river on this side that might block her from our view until we were right beside her." His somber look deepened: Sam did not need him to say that it would be especially true if Renie were lying unconscious or dead.
A cold shudder ran down her back. She wished she could remember some of the prayers they had taught her in Sunday school, but the youth pastor had been bigger on sing-alongs than on the nuts and bolts of what to do when you and your friends were marooned in an imaginary universe.
Remembering the youth group, and a boy with braces named Holger who—much against her wishes—had tried to kiss her at the Overnight Retreat campfire ceremony, Sam walked several steps before she realized that !Xabbu had stopped. She turned, and the stunned look on his face made her think for a moment that the worst had happened, that he had seen Renie's legs protruding from beneath a bush, or her body floating facedown in the river. She whirled to follow his angle of sight, but to her relief saw only a small cluster of trees on an otherwise empty hillock of grass close by the water.
"!Xabbu. . . ?"
He dashed past her toward the trees. Sam hurried after him.
"!Xabbu, what is it?" He was touching one of the branches, drawing his fingers slowly along the bark. His silence, his strange, devastated expression brought Sam close to tears. "!Xabbu, what's wrong?"
He looked at her face, then down at her feet. She made a move toward him but he grabbed her arm with surprising strength. "Do not move, Sam."
"What? You're frightening me!"
"This tree. It is the one to which Renie tied the piece of cloth." He waved the strip of frayed white fabric that he had been carrying in his hand like a holy relic since they had discovered it.
What are you talking about we left that behind two days ago!"
"Look down, Sam." He pointed at the ground. "What do you see?"
"Footprints. So what. . . ?" And then she understood.
A trail of her own footprints led back, showing where she had just crossed the powdery soil. But there were dozens more all around, mixed in with many others, including !Xabbu's own telltale small prints, more slender even than her own—far too many to have just been made. She put her foot down in one of the older tracks. It was a perfect fit.
"Oh, my God," she said. "That's too scanny. . . ."
"Somehow," !Xabbu said, his voice as miserable as she had ever heard it, "we have come back to our starting place."
Although the swift turn into nightfall was still at least an hour away, !Xabbu had made a fire: neither he nor Sam felt much interest in going any farther. The thin, silvery flames, which usually lent a homely atmosphere to their camps, at the moment seemed merely alien.
"It doesn't make any sense," Sam said again. "We never went more than a little way from the river. Even without a sun, we couldn't be that lost . . . could we?"
"Were there not our own footprints on this ground, I still could not forget this place—I could not mistake it for another," !Xabbu said forlornly. "Not the tree where we found a sign that Renie was alive and looking for us. Where I grew up, we know trees like we do people—better, since the trees stay in one place while people die and the wind blows their footprints away." He shook his head. "I knew for a long time that the land looked very much the same, but I tried to make myself believe I was mistaken."
"But that still doesn't explain how we could get so utterly lost!" Sam said. "Especially you—it just seems wrong."
"Because you still believe that you are in a real world," said Jongleur sharply. He had been silent for almost an hour; his sudden words startled them.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam demanded. "We still have up and down, don't we? Left and right? We followed the river through that whole impacted network of yours. . . ."
"But this is not my network," Jongleur interrupted. "That was planned by technicians, engineers, designers-conceived by humans, for humans. Left, right, up, down—very useful if you are human. Less meaningful for the Other."
!Xabbu looked at him bleakly but said nothing.
"Are you saying that everything just . . . changes here?" Sam asked. "That there are no rules?"
Jongleur picked a twig off the ground. Despite the occasional changes in the refractory quality of the land, Sam found it frustrating to see how normal everything looked, how ordinary, in a place that could play them such a terrible trick.
"It could be that we will find a place where the 'rules,' as you call them, are almost nonexistent," the old man said, rolling the long twig between his fingers. "But I suspect that there are indeed firm rules here—just not the sort we expect to find." He leaned forward and cleared a space in the dirt with his forearm, then used the twig to draw a row of small circles laid out side by side like a line of pearls. "The Grail network is set up something like this," he said. "Each circle a world." He drew a single stroke all the way from one end of the series of circles to the other—a strand on which the pearls hung. "The great river runs all through it, connecting every world to another world at each end. If you never left the river, used only those gates at either end of the simulation worlds, you would still eventually pass through every world before coming back to the beginning and starting again."
Sam studied the scrawl. "So? Why doesn't that work here? How did we lose the river?"
"I do not believe we did."
"How can that be?"
"Because there is no reason this world should be linear, as the Grail network is. We assume a river must have a source and an outflow, but even the connecting river of my network does not truly begin anywhere or end anywhere." Jongleur wiped out the string of pearls, then made a new circle, larger this time, with another squiggly circle inside it. "This place has even less reason to follow the model of a real world. I suspect what we have been doing is following the river here," he touched the wobbly circle with the end of the twig, "to here." He followed the squiggle all the way around until he reached the spot where it had started.
Sam stared. Beside her, !Xabbu was watching with more interest than he had shown in an hour. "So . . . that's all there is?" she asked. "We've seen the whole place? Just once around the bagel and we're done?" She shook her head, almost angry. "That's too woofie to be true. For one thing, if we've gone all the way around the whole world, where was Renie? And that friend of yours, Klement? They couldn't just disappear."
But maybe she could, Sam thought suddenly. Into a hole. Into a river. Lost. Lost like Orlando. . . .
"Perhaps the model is even more strange," said Jongleur. At that moment he seemed almost normal, like one of her teachers—not a chosen companion, but not an arch-villain either. And like her better teachers, he actually seemed interested in what he was talking about. Sam remembered that this was a man who, whatever his methods, had set out to solve the problem of human mortality.
Like, that Greek guy in the myths, who stole the secret of life from the gods. Orlando would remember his name.
Jongleur had wiped away his other drawings and replaced them with the largest circle yet, this one filled with half a dozen concentric wavy circles, so that the whole looked something like a watery bull's-eye. "Then consider this," he said. "Perhaps there are more worlds concealed within this world—many more, like Russian dolls. But instead of the river being the conduit between them, it is a barrier instead. So instead of following the river," he traced one of the river-rings back to his starting point, "which only brings us back to our starting point, we must instead cross over the river, into the next world." He drew a line from one ring, across the wavy river line, and into the next ring inward. "There is no need to mimic real-world geometry here. The self-elected god of this place doesn't know much about the real world, after all."