by Tad Williams
"There have so been newcomers," he said shrilly. "Stepmother told me."
"What kind of newcomers?" Renie asked. "What did they look like?"
"Don't know." He introduced a long finger into his finger-length nose and began to pick meditatively. "She just said they were strangers, and that strangers were dangerous, and that was why the Ending was going to take away our house."
"Where was this? Here in the Wood?
The boy shook his head. "Cobbler's Bench, where our house is." His finger paused. His face grew sad, struggling with the enormity of loss. "Was."
"And where is that? Are they still there?"
Another child, this one with the russet ears of a fox, yipped in derision. "Not nohow! The stepmothers chased them out of town!"
Finger-nose nodded. "They got Weasel to help, 'cause Monkey's sick."
"Renie!" The Stone Girl was beckoning to her. "We have to go."
As they left the refugees from Cobbler's Bench behind, Renie tried to stay buoyant. So there were newcomers—someone had seen them. That had to be !Xabbu and Sam. Unless it was Martine and the others . . . Renie had assumed that because they were not on top of the black mountain when the dust settled, Paul and Martine and the rest of her companions had been dispatched somewhere else—but who was to say that this nursery-rhyme world was not that somewhere else. And if everyone was being drawn toward this place called the Well, they would surely all find each other.
As the gray day wore on into what Renie felt must be afternoon, they found the river at last and began to pick their way along the marshy ground beside it. The dark, gurgling water lulled Renie into a dreamy routine of one-foot-after-another. Strangely, despite all the travelers they had seen in the forest, they met few along the riverside, and those were just as likely to be hurrying in the opposite direction. All wore looks of desperation. None would stop to talk.
Renie was beginning to wonder about her companion, too. The Stone Girl, previously so steady in her walking that Renie often found herself hurrying to keep up, seemed increasingly tired and confused. Several times she stopped and stared out across the river as though looking for something, although Renie saw only empty forest there.
At last, as the daylong twilight was just beginning to slide into something deeper and darker, the Stone Girl flopped herself down on a fallen tree. Her little shoulders were rounded, her earthen face somber.
"I can't find the bridges," she said. "We should have got to one of them by now."
"What bridges?"
"The places to cross the river. It's the only way to get out of the Wood unless we go all the way back through the trees to the other river." She made a little snuffling sound. "Then we could go back to Where The Beans Talk. If it's still there."
"The other river? There's another river?"
"There's always another river," the Stone Girl said dolefully. "At least there used to be. Maybe that's gone now, too."
Through careful questioning, Renie at last began to grasp that every single one of these lands—the Wood, the place Renie had met the Stone Girl, even the places she had not seen but had heard of, like More Very Bush and Say Dives—were bounded on either edge by a river. You had to cross a river to pass into the next land. The whole thing reminded her a bit of Lewis Carroll's chessboard world, where Alice found a different adventure in each square.
Yeah, but "curiouser and curiouser" doesn't cut it here, she thought. More like "worser and worser." Aloud, she asked, "So if we don't find a bridge, are we just stuck here?"
The Stone Girl shrugged miserably. "I don't know. Why would the Witching Tree tell us to go to the Well if we couldn't get there?"
Because the Witching Tree, or whatever's behind it, is running down, Renie thought. Or giving up.
It was Dread, she realized suddenly. On the hilltop, he had said something about inflicting pain on the operating system. It might have been a metaphor, but it seemed pretty obvious that there was a core of truth. Whether on purpose or not, Dread was slowly killing the thing that held the Otherland network—and most especially this part of it—together. "We can't do anything if we sit. Come on! Let's keep looking."
"But . . . but all my family. . . !" The Stone Girl looked up at Renie imploringly. Two little trickles were running down her dirt cheeks. "They're back there, and the Ending. . . !"
The tears shattered Renie's impatience. She dropped to her knees beside the small child made of earth and stones and put her arms around her, "I know, I know," she said helplessly. What could she say? What had she ever said to Stephen when he had been scared, or heartbroken with disappointment, except the thing that all grown-ups said to children? "Everything will be all right."
"But it won't!" The Stone Girl sniffed angrily. "I shouldn't have gone away! Polly and Little Seed and Tip, all the baby ones, they'll be scared. What if they don't get away? The Ending will come and take them!"
"Sssshh." Renie patted the little girl's back. "The stepmother will get them out. Isn't that what stepmothers do? Everything will be all right." It was hard not to dislike herself for making assurances she knew nothing about, but she could see little good for either of them in a long trek back across the Wood to the land of giant shoes and jackets.
Renie's soothing seemed to help a little. The Stone Girl stood up, still snuffling loudly. "Okay. We'll look for the bridge some more."
"Good girl."
The light was definitely lessening now, and there had been little enough to begin with. Eager not to spend another night on this side of the river, Renie hurried to keep up with her guide, and even forged ahead in some places where the reeds and riverside vegetation grew too high for the Stone Girl to see.
She had just relinquished the lead to the Stone Girl as they climbed up a rise between two bends of the river, when her companion stopped and cried out.
"Look! A bridge!"
Renie scrambled up after her so quickly that she slipped and had to catch herself with her hands; she was still wiping dirt and moist, too-pale grass off her blanket as she reached the little girl's side. Before them she could see an entire bend of the river valley. A large crowd had gathered on the near side of the river at the first stone of one of the most unusual bridges Renie had ever seen. It was made entirely of rectangular stone pillars stretching crookedly across the river like a linear Stonehenge. Although they were of slightly different heights, none of them seemed to be more than a meter or so from its neighbor. Renie could see how it would be possible to cross by clambering from one to the next, but the look of the thing, like a jaw full of uneven teeth, gave her a moment's sinking feeling.
It's like the mouth on the front of Mister J's, she thought. This whole place is just a crazy-mirror, isn't it? One of those funhouse affairs, but it reflects all the things that the Other has been forced to do.
"Why isn't anyone crossing it?" she asked.
The Stone Girl shrugged and trotted stiffly down the rise.
As they got closer, Renie could plainly see a continuation of the forest on the river's far side, but the middle of the bridge was swathed in mist so she could not actually make out where it touched the opposite shore. Still, that did not explain why so many travelers, a motley assortment of fairy-tale oddities that must have numbered almost a hundred, were gathered silently on the bank, looking yearningly toward the far side but not actually using the bridge.
"Is it . . . broken or something?"
As they reached the edge of the sullen crowd, the Stone Girl asked a woman in almost whimsically colorful medieval dress what was going on. The woman looked them up and down for a moment, paying particular attention to Renie, before answering.
"It's them Ticks, dearie. Dozens of them."
"Ticks?" The Stone Girl's eyes went wide. "Where?"
"On the other side," the woman replied with a certain grim satisfaction. "Some folk already tried to cross over—it's this Ending, you know. They said they weren't feared of a few Ticks. But it's not a few, is it? One or two of the ones what we
nt over got back to tell about it, but the rest got et."
As though whatever had animated her earthen body had suddenly ceased to work, the Stone Girl sagged to her knees. "Ticks," she said hoarsely. "They're so bad."
Renie felt herself go cold inside. "Are they worse than Jinnears?"
"They're bad," the Stone Girl would only say again.
"And some say them Ticks have some new ones still trapped over there," the woman in the colorful dress went on. "Some strange folk—not from anywhere around here."
"What?" Renie could barely resist the impulse to grab the woman by her bodice and haul her close. "What kind of strange folk?"
"Sure I don't know, dearie," the woman said, giving Renie a look that implied she had just been categorized as strange herself. "Heard it off a rabbit, I did, and they're always in a hurry. Or was it one of those squirrels. . . ?"
"On the other side, you're saying?" Renie turned to the Stone Girl. "Those might be my friends. I have to go help them."
The Stone Girl looked up at her, her dimple eyes pools of shadow, her face blank with apathy or helpless terror.
"Shit. Stay here." Renie began elbowing her way through the crowd assembled on the bank, a casting call for a surrealist painting. Most of them seemed gripped by the same mood of fear that had immobilized the Stone Girl; only a few even murmured as Renie forced her way past them.
The first stone of the bridge stretched almost Renie's height above the shallows. She found a handhold and pulled herself up, not without strain. She was tired after the long day's walk, and when she had dragged her belly up onto the rough surface of the stone's top she had to lie there for a moment until she could catch her breath. Sprawled and vulnerable, she could not help thinking of the way the bridge had looked, like a row of chewing teeth.
"Help me up," someone said.
Renie peered over the edge into the dark, upturned face of the Stone Girl.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm not going to stay here. You're my friend. And you don't know anything, either."
Terrified by the thought that !Xabbu and the others might be under attack, she only had a moment to consider. The girl was right about one thing—she knew a lot more than Renie. And with the system apparently dissolving the simworld around them, would the child be any safer waiting here, at least in the long run?
Bullshit justification, Sulaweyo. But what else was there?
"Grab my hand," she said.
When the little girl reached the top of the stone, she gestured for Renie to keep silent.
"Gray goose and gander, Waft your wings together,"
the Stone Girl intoned solemnly,
"And carry the good king's daughter
Over the one-strand river."
"You're always supposed to say it before you cross," she told Renie. Fear made her shrill. "Don't you know? It's very important."
They made their way quickly from tooth to tooth until the warning cries of those still waiting on the bank had faded. Midstream the water seemed faster, blackly turbulent as it washed between the close-set stones, the spray sharp and chilly as hail. The mist Renie had seen from the bank was all around them now, obscuring vision and making the stones slippery. She forced herself to take each step with slow care.
They were only a few stones past what she guessed was the midpoint of the river when the streams of mist thinned. Renie, crossing with a long stretch from one rocky tooth to another, was so startled that she almost lost her foothold and had to scramble to get her weight forward so she could jump to the waiting stone.
The far side of the river had changed completely.
Where before she had seen only primordial forest stretching into the distance on both sides, now she found herself confronted by a very different landscape. For a moment she thought it was some kind of formal garden, full of hedges and topiary shapes, but then the scale of the thing hit her and she realized she was looking at an entire town—a city—completely grown over by brambles and twining, crawling vines, a living green sculpture in the shape of houses and streets and church steeples.
"Is that . . . More Very Bush. . . ?"
The little Stone Girl only whimpered.
Almost the only contrast to the thousand shades of green were the many pale shapes moving over and through the bushes like maggots in a rotting carcass. Like the Jinnears, they were a sickly white, but where those things had been almost completely formless, these had the semblance of some kind of animal life. They were long and low to the ground, scalloped at the edges in what almost seemed a parody of legs, but they still moved horribly quickly, half-scuttling, half-slithering. They were also nearly her own size, and there were hundreds of them. The greatest number swarmed around the base of a green-strangled tower halfway into the town, a writhing white necklace easy to see even in the dying light, the creatures excited as ants who had discovered an unguarded wedding cake.
"Jesus Mercy," Renie said, her fear turning sharp and cold, so cold. "And those . . . are Ticks?"
The Stone Girl's voice barely rose above the noise of the river beneath them. She was weeping again, the words fracturing.
"I w–w–want m–my s–s–s–s–stepmotherr."
Third:
THE DYING HOUR
"How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again."
-Traditional
CHAPTER 23
Orientation
* * *
NETFEED/SPORTS: "Body Fascism" Litigant Killed in Practice
(visual: Note outside courtroom after victory)
VO: Edward Note, who won a court case in which he proved a local professional football team was discriminating against him based on body type when they initially refused to give him a tryout, was killed in his second day of practice with the team. Members of the Pensacola Fishery Barons BMFFL team, who are responsible to UN antidiscrimination laws because their stadium was built with revenue from local taxes, put on a public face of regret, but some team members said off the record that Note "only got what he deserved."
TEAM MEMBER (anonymated): "What did the guy weigh, a hundred twenty pounds, old school measurements? Running around with guys that weigh three or four times that? It's no wonder he got his foolish tiny ass crushed. Too bad for his kids, though."
VO: The thirty-eight-year-old Note, who declared contemporary pro sports a bastion of "body fascism," was apparently caught underneath a pile-up in practice and asphyxiated. His family is demanding an investigation of his death.
* * *
"Just a minute, Olga." The woman, a stranger of course, but acting as familiar as an old friend, handed her a cup of coffee which steamed convincingly. "I hear you're working for that J Corporation now. That must be fascinating—you hear so much about them in the news. What's it like?"
"I'm not allowed to talk about where I work," she said.
The woman smiled. "Oh, of course not—I know that! But I'm not trying to get you to tell any important secrets, am I? Just . . . what's it like? Is it really on an island?"
Surely everyone knew that. Still, Olga was unbending, "I'm sorry—I'm just not allowed to talk about where I work."
The woman frowned. "You're being really grumpy and silly about this. You must not be getting enough sleep. Are you working nights or something?"
"I'm really sorry, but I am not allowed to talk about my work."
The woman waved her hand in disgust. A moment later the room wavered and changed, so quickly that Olga felt a bit dizzy, almost sick.
They should do a better job with their transitions, she thought. If they ever got a job on the real net, for Obolos or someone, they'd get ripped to shreds for something like that.
She sat patiently as someone who was apparently a relative of hers asked her to bring home some extra office supplies for the kids—nothing important, just a few sticktights or hardclips for the poor, underprivileged darlings to make art
projects for school. Olga sighed and began her refusals, waiting as patiently as she could through the upward spiral of recrimination, waiting for it all to end.
"Well, an excellent score," Mr. Landreaux said after she had stepped out of the hologram room. He was a small man with a shaved head and a scatter of sparkling stones embedded in his wrist—trying a little too hard to look young, Olga thought. "You really studied up, didn't you?"
She tried not to smile. A quarter of an hour's examination of the company's voluminous hiring package the night before had made it pretty clear what the general idea was. "Yes, sir," she said. "This job is very important for me." And you can't even guess how true that is, can you?
"I'm glad to hear that. It's important to me, too." The personnel officer squinted at his wallscreen. "Your references are very, very good. Fourteen years at Reichert Systems—that's a very good company." He smiled, but she saw something else glint in his mild gray eyes. "Tell me again why you left Toronto."
This is really just a junior version of the man who gave me my exit interview at Obolos, she thought, another pink soft animal with sharp teeth. Does that Jongleur fellow grow them in vats, like those space-tomatoes? Aloud, she recited the story Catur Ramsey had invented for her, and that his friends had somehow turned into accomplished informational fact. "It's my daughter Carole, sir. Since her . . . since she split up with her husband, she needs some help with the kids so she can keep her job. She works so hard." Olga shook her head. This was cake. Convincing a hundred overstimulated children to be quiet so they wouldn't scare the Boxy Ox, that was real acting. If the whole thing were not so strange and terrible, she suspected she might even be enjoying this little trick—corporate folk were such easy yet somehow satisfying targets. "So I just thought, do you know, if I were nearer. . . ."
"So you left the Great White North and came all the way down here to the Big Easy," Landreaux said cheerfully. "Well, laissez les bontemps roulez, as we say." He leaned over, mock-conspiratorial. "But not during working hours, of course."