by Tad Williams
"I'll be right there, boys. Make sure he stays tied. Oh, and sharpen everything, will you?"
"Code Delphi. Start here.
"I never expected to speak those words again.
"A few hours ago I was certain that continuing this journal in the face of all but certain death—a journal that no one but me would ever find, even if the network survives—would be complete madness. These entries spoken into air are only to remind me of what I felt and thought, in the unlikely event that I can look back on this time from some future I still cannot imagine. So when I was at my lowest points of despair, as I was then, it seemed even worse than mad—it seemed dull and pointless. I have never wanted to leave some dramatic last will and testament that no one will hear. I have never been moved by displays of hopeless bravery, and certainly was not going to bother with one of my own.
"In short, I had surrendered.
"I do not know that anything has truly changed—our chance of survival is still vanishingly small—but I have found a little unexpected hope. No, not hope. I still believe we will lose our lives without seeing the end of this. Determination? Perhaps.
"When we survived the feverish horror of the Dodge City simworld only to be captured in Egypt, and worst of all, when we discovered we were—and still are—being held for Dread himself, I fell for a while into the lowest despair. The pit. A hole into darkness. I could not speak, could barely even think except for nightmare images of that room in the House world where Dread tormented me. If someone at that moment had offered to put a bullet in my head, I would have accepted it with gratitude.
"Then everything changed again—for the worse, if such a thing were possible". Our captor, Robert Wells, who apparently has now become Dread's lieutenant, brought two more prisoners to join us and took away Paul Jonas for interrogation. My misery was such that I could scarcely move. I fear for Paul. God, how I fear for him. He has already been through so much. . . ! I am shamed that my own suffering should have left me so self-involved. I cannot even imagine what he has experienced, lost in this network with little memory of his own real history and no knowledge of what was happening to him. To have kept so sane, to be so kind and so brave. . . . It is astonishing. And it is equally astonishing that I did not truly realize how much I admired him until he was taken away.
"Even now, he could be dead. Or perhaps in terrible, terrible, pain. Which would be worse?
"This is the curse I perceived before, the burden I have evaded all my life. To like people, to . . . love people, is to make oneself a hostage to fortune.
"So it was I began my slide into the abyss. For long minutes after Paul was taken—it might have been hours for all I could have guessed—I simply could not speak. Could not think. Terror had seized my heart, frozen my thoughts, turned me into something which could not move, and had nowhere to go even if it could.
"This is just a more direct version, I realize now, of what I have done in my own real life. Frightened, I have gradually sealed myself in the rocky depths of the mountains, in the sanctuary I share only with my machines. Without realizing it, I have actively conspired in making myself something much less than a person.
"Still, in the grip of the terror I could not see these things, but only now that it has passed. I might never nave left the black panic if it had not been for the hands of my friends upon me, Florimel and T4b, who thought I was having a heart attack. I felt them and heard them as though from a long distance, and for a while I did not wish to be plugged back into my nerves and senses. Better to hide in the black pit. Better to let my overwhelming fear protect me, as blocks of ice make a home that shelters Arctic hunters from the cold.
"Then, still at a great distance from my own self, I felt another set of hands upon me, clumsy, halting hands, and heard another voice. The new woman prisoner had dragged herself over to help, ignoring her own injuries. Even in the depths of my isolation I was shamed. Here was someone who had suffered what I only feared, and yet she could find the strength to worry about me, a stranger!
"I had thought that I would never come back to sanity, that I would simply fall down into that slow-motion blackness forever. How much worse, in a way, to return and find myself being cared for by my exhausted friends and even this newcomer, her limbs still trembling with the pain of what she had endured, as though I were a tired, fretful child commanding the attention of a group of adults.
"There are times when kindness is the sharpest cut of all.
"But even my shame passed. I realized that I knew both of the new prisoners at least by name—Bonnie Mae Simpkins, who had shown such kindness to Orlando and Fredericks, and Nandi Paradivash, who had been the first to explain to Paul that he was trapped in Jongleur's simulation network. Nandi was in a state something like I had been, torn with guilt at what had happened to Paul, and also clearly the victim of agonizing treatment, but the Simpkins woman spoke for both of them. She told how in opening a gateway and sending Orlando and Fredericks through, the remaining members of the Circle had waited too long, so that their own escape was prevented by the collapse of the great Temple of Ra which followed Jongleur's appearance in his guise as Osiris, master of this simulation world. Jongleur had not stayed long, and the survivors had hidden in the ruins, hoping to find another way out of the simulation, but within days Osiris had been supplanted by Anubis and the already bad state of affairs rapidly became worse.
"Bonnie Mae Simpkins described the destruction that followed Dread's taking control of the simworld, an orgy of murder and torture at feast as grisly as that which we had seen in Dodge City. Although I thought myself numbed by this point, I was nevertheless chilled by her description of what happened here, of the public burnings, Dread's orchestrated symphonies of murder, wild jackals devouring the bodies of children in the streets while their parents were forced to watch. Chilled because I realized that even in this network where every whim could be indulged, there was no upper limit to his homicidal madness.
"Dread's power and his ambition are growing, but how long can mere simulations feed such an appetite? If he has Jongleur's power outside the network as well as inside—and if Jongleur is truly dead, why shouldn't Dread control his worldwide operations?—then the possibilities are quite terrifyingly vast.
"As Bonnie Mae spoke, I had a sudden thought, and asked, 'What about the other children? The little flying children that Orlando mentioned?' I could not remember the name they called themselves—the Wicked Group, the Nasty Club, something silly.
"This question made her even more sad. She told us that although the monkey-children had wanted to follow Orlando and Fredericks through the gateway, they had been distracted by the chaos in the temple of Ra and so they had all been left behind when the gateway closed.
"Bonnie Mae Simpkins said she had tried to keep them hidden when soldiers found her and Nandi and brought them here, but the monkey-children had flown away, pursued by some of the temple guards. She felt sure they had been captured and probably killed, since even Dread would have felt there was little information to be gathered from a group of children who had not reached school age.
"She went on to tell something of the horrors she and Nandi had experienced, largely because Dread knew they had been seen in the company of Orlando and Fredericks. This was chilling too—it was bad enough to know we were soon to be delivered to Dread, worse to know he had been actively seeking us. His vengeance, it seems, will not be offhanded.
"But the idea of Orlando's monkey-children friends would not leave my head.
"You see, I had turned a corner of sorts. I was and am still resigned to death, and to an unpleasant one at that, but I cannot bear to wait for it passively. Where this has led me, I will tell in a moment. But I listened less and less closely to Bonnie Mae Simpkins' terrible stories, because . . . because I needed to think about something else. I understand now Renie's bullheaded, chronic need to go forward—when there is nothing to be done, to want to do something anyway.
"We will all die. It is what gives li
fe its shape and even its beauty, perhaps, this fact of its brevity. So why bother to do anything except gratify oneself, faced with that? And knowing it may come literally at any moment, as we do, why not simply surrender?
"I do not know. But I know now I cannot.
"I told the pair from the Circle, 'I do not think the little monkeys have been captured. Dread wanted to break your spirit—he likes that even more than inflicting pain. And he truly wanted to make you tell all you knew about Renie and the rest of us. So if the guards had caught them, he would have threatened you with harming them. He would have been delighted to do it.'
" 'Maybe they escaped, then,' Bonnie Mae Simpkins said. 'The Lord keep 'em safe—I sure hope they did escape, poor little creatures.' I could almost feel her calling on a few last dregs of optimism, and again was shamed by the comparison with my own earlier behavior.
"Florimel remembered what Orlando and Fredericks had said about Nandi's expertise, so she asked Nandi if it was possible to open a gateway here in the prison cell. Slowly and with great pain—I think several of his ribs are broken, although that is an odd thing to consider since we are all wearing virtual bodies—he explained that he could only open a gate at a designated spot, and certainly there was no such thing in these prison rooms. As he spoke I began to think in earnest about what was possible and what was not, remembering that as much as it might seem like it, we were not actually prisoners in a temple of stone, but in the idea of a temple.
"Slowly, other ideas came to me. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would burst the doors or slay the guards, but enough to give me occupation, for which I was grateful. When Nandi had finished his explanation, I asked the others to be silent for a while. Even T4b—who in fact has been as reserved as I have ever seen him since Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins were thrown in with us—did not protest.
"This virtual universe is constructed on stories, it seems, and I suspect that in part that is my own fault. I believe I helped to feed the Other the first tales on which the system has created and defined itself, and particularly the story which appears to define its hopes, if one can say such a thing about an artificial intelligence. And in our way, we have each of us become defined as though we were characters—Renie the bold and sometimes overly stubborn hero, !Xabbu her wise companion, Paul the one buffeted by fate, a mystery to himself and others. For a long time I had thought my role was clear. I was the blind seeress—I even made a joke of it in the indicators I used to mark my journal entries for later salvage. But with !Xabbu helping me I had accomplished more than that, opening a gate where no others could have managed. In fact, the unusual senses this place gives me have allowed me many times to do what my friends could not.
"Apparently, I am a sorceress—a witch. A good witch. I hope.
"Here, within this invented world, I have powers. As I sat in the cell thinking about Nandi's struggles to make the system work, I realized that I have not fully tapped those powers. And what better time to do so than now, with Dread to arrive at any moment?
"I asked my companions for quiet, then did my best to grasp what lay beyond the walls of our small cell. When I have reached out in this way before, in the House world or the Place of the Lost, it has always been in the open, where I could read information from air currents and long echoes, even if I could not always identify them as such. My abilities seemed an extension of natural senses, so I have always thought of them as limited in the same way, but I had just realized I did not know this to be true. Thus, as my friends waited in confused, fearful silence, I opened up and tried to see, hear, feel—there really are no proper words—what lay outside.
"Exploring the ways of the system with !Xabbu, I had always felt a fundamental separation between his perceptions of it and mine, something which the symbology of the string game and its mathematical underpinnings had helped to bridge but had never fully eliminated. Now I began to think of what that separation meant—why, after all, should a young man with so little experience of the information sphere grasp things that I, with years of study plus the altered and enhanced perceptions the network granted me, could only barely understand? The reason, I have come to realize, is that I am limited by my own expectations. !Xabbu was taught by his people to absorb everything the world gives him and then, after sifting out the most important details, to act on them. But he is also clever and supremely flexible. Faced with a new world, he did not try to force it to comply with his expectations, but began all over to learn the rules, without prejudice as to where the information came from.
"But I—along with all the rest of us, I suppose—have been fooled by the way this network mimics reality, and have tried to make sense of the world as though it were in fact the real world. Even using the astonishing abilities I have here, I have allowed myself to hear only what could be heard, touch only what could be touched, and then channeled that data into something safely like the real-world model. The irony of this—that a blind woman should so desperately struggle to make a place where she is superior to her companions into something more like the real world in which she was inferior to them—is almost staggering.
"So what would !Xabbu do? Even in the midst of horror and despair, I smiled at the thought. What would !Xabbu do? He would open himself. He would let what was around him speak and he would listen without prejudice instead of trying to force the information into some orderly, preconceived scheme.
"I tried to do the same.
"The first thing I discovered was that I was still terrified despite my outward show of calm. My heart was speeding, and the sound of Paul Jonas taking a startled breath as the guards seized him was still fresh in my thoughts, as though the echo of it were immortalized within our prison cell. That thought gave me another idea, which I put aside for a moment, concentrating instead on calming and clearing my mind. I did my best, but I am far too weak to learn that kind of serenity in a matter of minutes.
"It was difficult to lose the idea of the cell walls and in fact the entire temple as a real and solid thing. I suppose that for mystics and scientists it takes a similar effort of will to perceive the physical world as only a coherence of energy. I had dim inklings of what lay beyond our prison-sound information, smells—and to me they were already more significant than they would have been for any of my companions, but I needed more than that. I had to let myself feel them as equally significant to the things happening within the cell itself, until the walls began to blur into insignificance, until the signature of the simulated obstacles was only another piece of information. I had to learn to look through the walls, not at them, to put it in the language of the seeing.
"It took a long time, but when it happened, it was quite sudden—a single twist of perception, then I could feel the information arrayed in front of me, layer upon layer, the information of the guards in the corridor outside just as significant as that of my companions in the cells. One of them was scratching his head. I laughed. It felt a bit like discovering a trick, like that childhood day when I first learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. I moved cautiously to expand my survey, tracing the knitted expression of the wall-information on the corridor's far side, then sliding through it, as it were, to examine other corridors and rooms.
"This ability is not by any means limitless. The farther from myself I aim my perception, and the more barriers I penetrate, the less reliable the information. A hundred meters away from our cell the signature of a person—a sim pretending to be a person, that is—was little more than a humanoid shape, identifiable mostly because of movement. Twice that distance and only movement itself was noticeable. As my attention roved, I found several clusters of human shapes and movement, any one of which might have been Paul and his captors, but they were too far away for definite identification.
"I let my perceptions travel farther outward, looking for the energy-shadow of a gateway, the thing that lingers even when the gateway itself is closed. I found one at last which seems to be just at the edge or just outside of the temple-palace, but by this time
my head was pounding. I surfaced, returning to the cell and my companions, and told them what I had discovered. I asked Nandi a few questions, and his answers confirmed Orlando's description of him as an expert on the network's internal travel mechanisms. Armed with this extension of my own investigations of the gateways, I let myself reach out to find the gateway again.
"It was more difficult this time. I was weary and my head ached, but I needed to examine the gateway to make sure it was functioning. Strangely, although it seemed open and in working order, I could not access the usual gateway information. But at least it seemed like it would take us somewhere else, and right now, that is our main need.
"I barely had time to explain this to the others before exhaustion pulled me down and I slept like a dead thing. When I woke, perhaps an hour later, the tiny bit of good cheer my news had roused in the others had turned back into a miserable silence, since as long as we were trapped in a cell, even a nearby gateway might as well have been on the moon.
"Despite feeling like my skull was made of old, brittle glass, I decided to try something different. Time was running out—time is running out. I could not afford to wait until I felt better, since Dread might appear at any moment, but I did not want to raise anyone's hopes either.
"In fact, although I experienced some success with this last attempt, there is still little about which to be hopeful.
"Again I let myself open. For a moment I feared I had lost the knack, that the walls would remain solidly impenetrable, but I thought of !Xabbu and calmed myself and at last the shift came. I reached out, not in any one direction, but generally, letting my attention flow diffusely outward through the information patterns. I was looking for something less specific than the signature of a gateway, and the farther away from the cell I went exploring, the harder it was to sift through the information.