by Tad Williams
The Stone Girl scraped her foot against the ground, swaying a little. Clearly it was difficult, even painful for her to wait once the Witching Tree had told her what to do. "I really have to. . . ."
"I know," said Renie. She took a deep breath. "I'm coming. I'm coming with you."
I don't have any choice, she kept telling herself, but it felt exactly like treachery. !Xabbu and the others might never have made it out of that gray . . . whatever it was. They might have been tossed into another part of the network, or they could even be. . . . It was almost impossible even to consider it. I could look for them forever. And this could be my last chance to help Stephen.
Of course, that's assuming I can do anything for him even if I find him, she thought grimly. Considering I can't even get myself offline, that's a pretty big assumption.
"Are you angry at me?" the Stone Girl asked.
"What?" Renie realized they had been walking for a long time without speaking. She had a sudden recollection of what it meant to be with an angry adult, thinking that she was the cause, and was ashamed. Even in the days before her mother had died, her father had been prone to sullen silences. "No! No, I'm just thinking." She looked around at the sparkling trees that still surrounded them, an endless series of leafy tunnels through the forest. "Where are we, anyway? I mean, does this place have a name? Is it called Witching Tree or something?"
"The Witching Tree isn't a place, it's a thing." The Stone Girl was clearly relieved: even Renie's invincible ignorance did not draw the usual look of disbelief. "There are lots of places it can be—that's why we had to go look for it."
"And we found it . . . where?"
"Here. I told you, it's always in the Wood."
"And where are we going?"
The Stone Girl considered for a moment. "I don't know for sure. But I think we'll have to go through More Very Bush and maybe even Long Done Bridge. It's really hard to cross there."
"Cross. . . ?"
"The river, silly." Renie's companion frowned. "I just hope we don't have to go through Jinnear Bad House. That's too scary."
More Very Bush and Jinnear Bad House. Those would be . . . Mulberry Bush and Gingerbread House, Renie guessed. She was beginning to get the knack. "Why is it scary?"
The Stone Girl put her hand up to her mouth. "I don't want to talk about it. We don't want to go there. But there are Ticks and Jinnears there, lots of them."
Ticks and Jinnears. For some reason, the phrase stuck in Renie's mind, but unlike the place names, which seemed to be childish malformations of things like London Bridge, she couldn't find an easy explanation. But having seen the things, she was just as eager as her companion to avoid something called Jinnear Bad House.
"What are Ticks? Are they as bad as Jinnears?"
"Worse!" The little girl gave a theatrical shudder. "They're all starey. They have too many eyes."
"Ugh. I'm convinced. So if we have a long trip ahead of us, shouldn't we stop and sleep? I'm tired, and you, if you'll excuse me saying so, are definitely up past your bedtime."
Now her small guide did indeed put on a look of disgust. "Go to sleep in the Wood? That's a stupid idea."
"Okay, okay," Renie said. "You're the boss. But how far do we have to go before we can get some sleep?"
"Until we find a bridge, silly."
Properly told off, Renie subsided.
As the flying-saucer moon hovered overhead, showing no signs of moving toward a horizon, they walked deeper and deeper into the forest—deeper, Renie knew, because the trees got taller and taller around them. They had long since left the black lake and its sentient tree behind, but Renie could not help feeling observed, although she was not sure whether by the small, secretive eyes of invisible forest dwellers or by some larger, more godlike entity. The clearings, with the branches arching cathedral-high overhead, glittering with fairy-lights like a sky full of bright stars, seemed particularly watchful. The weird, cartoonish beauty of the setting could not overcome the hackle-raising sensation of traveling through enemy territory.
Well, why shouldn't it feel this way? she thought. If I'm right, I'm not just inside the network any more, I'm inside the operating system itself—right in the belly of the beast.
Pulling her blanket-cloak tighter around her to ward off a forest breeze, Renie suddenly touched the lumpy shape of the lighter underneath her top, pressed against her breast.
"Oh, no! I called Martine. . . ." In the unceasing strangeness since then, she had completely forgotten her distress call from the hillside, with the Jinnears coming down on her from all around. "She must think. . . ."
The Stone Girl stopped, eyebrow dents raised in astonishment, to watch Renie pull the small shiny object from inside her clothing and speak into it. "Martine, can you hear me? Martine, this is Renie, can you hear me?"
No answer came back to her. Renie shook the lighter as though it were a stopped watch, conscious even as she did so how stupidly RL the gesture was. It made no difference, anyway: the lighter remained as silent as a stone.
They walked on, Renie adding the horror she must have visited on Martine and anyone else with her to her list of sins.
It's getting to be a long list, she thought. Failed to find my brother, didn't do anything useful to interfere with the Brotherhood's plans, deserted !Xabbu and Sam, and also called my other friends and made them think I was about to get killed.
Yes, but you really were about to get killed, she reminded herself. Ease up, girl.
As they walked on through twinkling trees and woodland dells carpeted by dark grass that wavered without wind, studded with circles of pale, dully-shining mushrooms, Renie began to feel a different kind of liveliness to the Wood. She began to hear rustles in the foliage and once or twice thought she saw shadows just disappearing around a bend of one of the long open pathways before them. She mentioned it to the Stone Girl, who nodded sagely.
"Other people going to the Well," she said. "The Ending is coming fast, I guess."
"So they're not . . . Jinnears. Or Ticks."
The Stone Girl managed a tiny smile. "We'd know."
The vast moon had still not moved noticeably from one side of the sky to another, but Renie had just decided that it had perhaps slipped a bit lower when they saw the camp-fire on a small knoll ahead of them through the trees. The Stone Girl hesitated for a moment, peering at the flicker of light, then lifted her stubby finger to her mouth for silence and led Renie forward. Strange shapes were clustered around the flames. The Stone Girl slowed again, leaning forward and squinting, then straightened.
"It's just dwarfs," she said cheerfully, taking Renie by the hand.
A sentry shape at the edge of the knoll lifted a stick and said, "Who goes there?" in a high, querulous voice.
My God, Renie thought. More children. Is everyone in this place a child?
"We're friends," the Stone Girl announced. "We won't hurt you."
The creatures huddled around the fire watched their approach warily. Renie was at first secretly pleased to see that the dwarfs numbered exactly seven, but discovered a few moments later that she was a little less comfortable with how they actually looked. They might be someone's idea of dwarfs, but as with so many things she had seen lately, it was a very curious kind of idea.
The little men were all dwarf-high—the nearest, the stick-wielding sentry, stood no taller than Renie's hips—but although the Other, if it was indeed the creator, apparently understood that dwarf meant small, it had accomplished this not by miniaturizing a normal person, but by leaving out or rearranging parts. The dwarfs had faces that grew right out ol their chests, and after she had studied the awkward gait of the sentry, who had fallen into step beside them, she realized that his legs ended at the knee: there was no joint in the middle, which made the little fellow walk something like a penguin. His arms, however, were of normal length: he used them to aid his movements, knuckle-walking like a chimpanzee.
Renie forced herself to remain calm, although it reminded her
unpleasantly of the grotesque patchwork creatures in the Kansas simulation—not only cruelty made monsters, it seemed. As Renie and her friend reached the fire the little creatures rose and greeted them with awkward bows. The tallest, whose shoulders were as high as Renie's waist, asked, "Are you searching?"
"No," the Stone Girl replied. "Just walking. Are you going to the Well?"
"Soon. But first we must find what we have lost. And we have lost everything, even our home!"
One of the other dwarfs was staring right at Renie. "Say Dives," he said mournfully.
"Um . . . dives," she answered after a moment, wondering whether this was a greeting ritual or some kind of test.
"No, they're from Say Dives," the Stone Girl whispered.
"Say Dives is gone!" the leader said, his mouth open from floating rib to floating rib in a gape of woe. "The meadows, the mountains, our beautiful caves! Gone!"
"The Ending has t–t–taken it all by now," said the one beside Renie, choking back a sob. "When I came home from work, my house was gone—and all my wives! The cats and sacks—all gone, too!" The other dwarfs echoed his misery in a wordless chorus of moans.
"The stepmothers came and told us we had to run away," the leader said. "The people that we meet here in the Wood say we must go to the Well. But we cannot go until we find our wives and our sacks and all our cats! There is a chance that they escaped!"
"A man without wives and kits and cats is no man at all," another proclaimed heavily. A deep, tragic silence fell on the gathering.
"So . . . so you people have stepmothers also?" Renie asked at last, finding herself a seat on a log near the fire, trying very hard not to stare at what to her was a pattern of ghastly deformities. The dwarfs beside her slid down to make room. She had to remind herself that however bizarre this seemed to her, these events were just as terrible to them as to any real-world refugees.
The shy-eyed fellow beside her, his face set so low on his belly that his belt looked like it must be strangling him, offered her a cup of something that steamed. "Stone soup," he said quietly. "It's good."
Renie's guide looked over, her face solemn with worry. "You eat . . . stones?"
The leader shook his head. "We would never harm you, friend—we eat only unliving minerals. Besides, if you will forgive me, you look to be mostly sediment. No offense, but that is not to our taste."
"No offense taken," the little girl said in relief.
"Does everyone who lives in . . . in these places . . . do they all have stepmothers?" Renie asked.
The dwarfs could not cock their heads, since they had no necks, but they bent themselves into several strange positions to indicate surprise. "Of course," said the leader. "How else would we know when danger is near? Who else would guard us when we sleep?" His lower lip drooped toward the fork of his legs. "But they can't stop the Ending."
So the stepmothers are part of the operating system, Renie decided. A kind of monitoring subroutine—maybe a harsh one, like the wicked stepmothers in all those stories. But where do the monsters, these Ticks and Jinnears, fit in? She tried to think of a nursery rhyme with a tick in it, but the closest she could come up with was "Hickory Dickory Dock," which wasn't very close at all.
"Where are you from?" one of the dwarfs asked Renie. She looked helplessly at the Stone Girl.
"Where The Beans Talk," the little girl answered. "But we went to the Witching Tree, and it told us it was time to go the Well."
It didn't tell me that, Renie thought morosely. It didn't tell me much of anything. A sudden thought led to her to ask, "Have any of you seen any others like me? A brown-skinned man and a girl with skin a little lighter?"
The dwarfs shrugged sadly. "But the Wood is full of travelers," one said. "Perhaps your family is among them."
Renie said nothing, struck by the idea. !Xabbu and Sam Fredericks, her family. It was true in a way, and not just in shared skin color. Few people had ever suffered greater hardships with their real families, and certainly no one had suffered anything more consistently peculiar.
Conversation wound down quickly. The dwarfs had made a heroic effort to be good hosts, but their hearts were clearly not in it, and Renie and the Stone Girl were exhausted. They curled up on the ground to rest while the dwarfs went on talking among themselves in quiet voices full of confusion and loss. Although she had proved herself much less bothered by cold than Renie, the Stone Girl pushed herself tight against Renie's body and within moments seemed to be asleep—so much so that Renie could detect no breathing at all. She wrapped her arms around the compact little form and watched the firelight glimmering in the treetops above her head. She was wandering now in a weird, childish dream-world—a dream-world under siege. She had lost everyone and everything. Of all who had come to Sellars' summoning, only she remained. Even the operating system, the god of this small world, had admitted defeat. What was there left to do?
I can hold this child, she thought. Even if it's just for one night, I can give her a little comfort, a sense of safety—even if it's an illusion.
So, as the huge disk of the moon crawled down toward the horizon and Renie eased into a sleep she desperately needed, that was what she did.
When she awoke, a diffuse glow had spread across the world, a sad gray light that did little to make things seem more hopeful. The dwarfs had gone, leaving only the embers of their fire behind. The Stone Girl was already awake, squatting by the dying fire, poking in the ashes with a stick.
Renie yawned and stretched. Even in this sickly dawn it was good to have a blanket to wrap around herself, good to have someone to talk to. She smiled at the little girl. "It feels like I slept a long time, but I guess I didn't. So if there's a moon here, why isn't there a sun?"
The Stone Girl gave her a quizzical look. "Sun?"
"Never mind. I see our friends are gone."
"A long time ago."
"Why didn't they wait for the sun . . . I mean, for morning?"
"They did. It's been this way since before they left." Renie now noticed for the first time that her companion was frightened. "I don't think there's going to be any more light than this."
"Oh." Renie glanced around. It was dark, the sky a mournful, shadowy gray. "Oh. Does this . . . happen very often?"
"That it doesn't turn into day?" The little girl shook her head. "Never."
Jesus Mercy, Renie thought, does this mean the system's shutting down now? Is this part of the Ending everyone's so afraid of? If the operating system were a person, Renie would certainly have diagnosed severe depression at the very least. "So is the damn thing just going to give up on us?" she said aloud.
And what if it does? If we're inside it, somehow, do we go, too? It was hard to believe that, locked as they were within the system, subject to damage and death just as in real life, she and her friends would survive a complete collapse of the network.
And Stephen, and all the other children here, trapped, helpless. . . .
"We have to get going." Renie struggled to her feet. "To the Well, I guess. But you'll have to lead us there."
Her guide balanced on her haunches and looked out at the encircling forest. "We need to find a bridge," she said listlessly. "Then we can go to More Very Bush. Or maybe to Counting House. There's a king there," she added.
Renie wasn't certain she wanted to meet this odd fairy tale's version of royalty—for all she knew, he might incline toward the Alice's Wonderland, off-with-their-heads model. "So we find a bridge." She hesitated. "Does that mean we have to find the river first?"
The Stone Girl snorted. "Of course."
"Give me a chance." Renie was glad to see a more normal response from her companion. "I'm just getting the hang of all this."
What had been mysterious, twinkling fairy-paths in the night had become something less charming now—a series of winding ways through a dank, dark forest—but no less confusing. Even in the glum half-light, Renie could see other travelers passing through the Wood, although few even made eye contact, let
alone stopped to converse. Many had carts or wagons drawn by strangely unconvincing beasts of burden, horses and goats and oxen that seemed to be three-dimensional mock-ups created from children's drawings. Renie recognized a few as refugees from the storybooks of her childhood, like a trio of pigs and a nervous-looking wolf who were traveling together, having apparently made common cause, but there were far more she could not identify, some so bizarre they made the dwarfs look like net-show models. But all the travelers trudging or hurrying through the dim byways of the Wood had one thing in common, the worried expressions on their faces—at least among those that had faces. Some were openly weeping. Others staggered, blank-faced as shock victims.
The Stone Girl stopped in a clearing to talk with the leaders of a large party, perhaps three dozen refugees in all. As the little girl shared news with a buck deer and a tiny bumblebee-man perched between his antlers, Renie found herself staring at the faces of the group they were herding, looking for Stephen.
But he won't took like Stephen, she told herself. Which means he could be any one of these—he could be anyone we've seen today!
Nevertheless, she walked over for a closer inspection.
"Have any of you seen some people who look like me—with skin like mine?" she asked. Several faces, animal and human, turned to look at her in dull hopelessness. "A little boy, or even a man and a girl? They would be newcomers—people you hadn't seen before."
"The Wood is full of strangers," said a woman carrying a hedgehog wrapped in a baby blanket. She spoke as if each word were a heavy stone that must be lifted.
"But I mean real newcomers. From outside." She tried to remember how the others had phrased it. "From beyond the White Ocean."
The crowd stirred, but only a little. The buck and the bee-man turned to look at her, then resumed their conversation with the Stone Girl.
"Nobody has crossed the White Ocean in a long time," the hedgehog-mother said. "Since before the Ending began."
"What does it matter?" asked a fish-faced man. "Who cares?"
"I care. . . ." Renie began, but she was interrupted by a little boy with a nose as long as a finger.