by Tad Williams
I don't really want to see what's on the other side. . . .
Something touched his arm and he jumped.
"Didn't lie to no one, me," T4b said quietly. Paul was amazed that in the midst of this doom-laden atmosphere the boy was still worrying about what people thought.
"I believe you, Javier."
"Sorry. Sorry . . . I tried to six you." He spoke so quietly Paul did not immediately understand him. "On the mountain, like."
"Oh! Oh, that. It's all right, really."
"But that girl, Emily, she was chizz. Had ops for her, me. Utterly did." He seemed desperate for Paul to understand. "Then when all that fen blew up. . . ."
The whole conversation was surreal. First Nandi, now this boy. When did I become the father-confessor? Or is it because they both think we probably won't be alive much longer—that soon it will be too late for apologies. . . .
"Are you all simply going to wander around until someone shows up to kill us?" Martine called, her voice ragged with pain or fear or both, startling both Paul and T4b. "Come and help me open this door!"
They hurried across the echoing room. The others gathered near the doors, whispering. Paul wanted to laugh, but the ache of fear was too great. Why bother to be quiet? Did they think the thing on the other side was really sleeping, that it wouldn't hear them? He remembered the monstrous presence he had summoned on Ithaca, the thing that had come to Orlando and Fredericks in the Freezer. Didn't they understand this place by now? The Other was always sleeping—but it was always listening, too.
Weighed down by dark foreboding that made it hard to think or even move, he let himself be pressed in beside T4b and Nandi to pull at the huge double doors. For a moment there was no movement, then the great bronzed panels swung outward with a screech like some angry primordial beast. The Wicked Tribe darted back from the opening as though the cavern beyond were full of poisonous gas or burning-hot air; Paul could not help remembering what Martine had said about an oven.
"Not go in there!" one of the monkeys shouted. "Wait out here!" They looped up into the high reaches of the antechamber and hung near the doorway leading back outside, babbling in fear and excitement.
Martine had already stepped through like a woman wading into a high wind. Paul followed her, expecting to feel something similar to what she was experiencing, but the sensation of oppressive menace was no greater outside the room than in.
The chamber was made of rough, dark stone, as though it had been hurriedly chipped from a living mountain. At the center, its exquisitely carved and polished lines in sharp contrast, lay a gigantic black stone sarcophagus.
Paul could feel the others pressing in behind him, but he was unwilling to take another step. Martine had her hands to her ears again, swaying in place as though dizzy. Paul feared she might fall, but even that could not make him move closer to the silent black box.
"He . . . he feels me. . . ." Martine said in a strangulated whisper. It echoed from the walls and came back in pieces: "Feels me . . . feels. . . ."
A light, painfully bright, flared at the side of the cavern, twenty meters from the coffin. As though in a nightmare, Paul could not move, but he felt his heart lurch inside his breast.
The light hung in the air for a moment, dripping sparks like burning magnesium, then resolved into a human-shaped blank white hole. Paul was surprised to feel a dull and somewhat anticlimatic tug of recognition. Still, neither he nor his companions were quite prepared for the high-pitched voice that echoed across the cavern.
"Man! What kind of mierda that crazy old man throw me in this time?"
The astonishing spectacle of a twitching, featureless figure swearing in Spanish was interrupted by the explosive entrance into the tomb-chamber of a cloud of yellow, finger-sized monkeys.
"Someone coming!" they squealed, "Look out! Le big chien!"
Their shrill excitation made it almost impossible to figure out what was going on. "What on earth are you children screaming about?" Bonita Mae Simpkins demanded. "Zunni, you tell me straight—the rest of you, quiet!"
"No wonder you all friends with Sellars," declared the glowing shape with a mixture of amusement and disgust, "You all loco, for true."
"Sellars?" said Florimel, startled.
"It's coming," the little monkey named Zunni explained.
"What?"
"Big black dog," she squeaked. "Coming here across the desert."
"Big, big dog," one of the other monkeys piped up. "Big like a mountain. Coming fast!"
CHAPTER 35
Rainbow's Shoe
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Chargeheads Getting "In the Mood"
(visual: VNS outpatients waiting for module adjustment)
VO: Vagal Nerve Stimulation, or VNS, an artificial mood-altering process prescribed by some doctors as a cure for charge addiction, may itself become another form of addictive behavior,
(visual: Dr. Karina Kawande, inset)
KAWANDE: "It was inevitable, really. Stimulating the vagus nerve to relieve stress is an acceptable substitute for dangerous street-gear only when the pulse dosage can be controlled. But any device based on code can be hacked, and there are patients now who have their VNS pulsing twenty-four hours a day. . . ."
* * *
As they walked through the crowd, face after strange face slid past Sam Fredericks like some endless nightmare—dogs, bears, opal-eyed snakes, children with wings and birds' heads, boys and girls made from wood or gingerbread or even glass. But of the thousands of creatures that surrounded the Well and its roiling lights, an entire refugee camp beneath the endless twilit skies, not a single one was familiar.
Not a single one was Renie Sulaweyo.
Sam could barely stand to look at !Xabbu, who she knew must be even more disappointed than she was. When they had left Azador with his rediscovered Gypsy family, !Xabbu had set out almost at a run to begin the search for Renie, but as the day had worn by without any sign of her the small man's steps had become slower and slower. In all their journeying, even in the most desperate of times, she could scarcely remember him looking tired. Now he moved as though almost too weary to breathe.
"We should go back now." Sam took his arm. She felt his resistance but kept her grip. "We can look some more later."
His face, when he turned to her, was hollow-eyed, devastated. "She is not here, Sam. Not anywhere. And if this is the last place in this world. . . ."
She did not want to think about it, and she did not want !Xabbu thinking about it either. "No, we don't really know how this scanny place works. And we might have missed her, anyway—I'm getting so tired my eyes are blurring."
He sighed. "It is terrible of me to drag you on like this, Sam. We will go back and rest for a while with Azador's people."
"Chizz. Do you remember where they are?" She looked around at the ring of featureless hills. "I'm lost." Sam felt a little guilty—she had appealed to his protective instincts on purpose—but knew it was for his own good. It was funny how much !Xabbu was like Orlando, she thought. You couldn't get either of them to do much for themselves, but they would throw themselves off a building for a friend.
Orlando even got himself killed for me. . . . It was not a good thought and she pushed it away.
Making their way back through the aimless, uneasy throng seemed to take hours. Some of the other refugees had also worked hard to locate their own lost fellows—tiny exile communities from places with names like Where The Beans Talk and Cobbler's Bench had been pointed out to Sam and !Xabbu by helpful folk—but many more seemed to have simply walked as close to the Well as they could get, then stopped.
Azador's Gypsy kin had either arrived early or had staked their claim more aggressively than most. Their camp was close to the edge of the Well, the painted wagons clustered at the bottom of a bluff, as though a group of day-trippers had decided to picnic on the edge of an immense bomb crater—but no bomb crater had ever looked like this. When Sam had first seen it, she had thought that the black water
s reflected the unchanging evening sky overhead and its sprinkling of faint stars. As they had drawn closer, all of them quiet and withdrawn except Azador, all troubled by their experiences crossing the covered bridge, she had discovered that the Well was a mirror of a very different kind. The stars, or whatever unstable points of light moved in its dark depths, were not static like those in the sky: they flared and died, as inconstant as foxfire. Sometimes an even greater light bloomed far below, so that for a moment all the well was full of a ruddy glow, as though a supernova had been born in the deepest expanses. Other times the points of brilliance dimmed and then disappeared entirely; for a few moments the Well became utterly black, a lightless hole gouged into the desolate earth.
"It is the mountain turned upside down," !Xabbu had said when they first approached it, even as Azador hurried ahead of them like a man rushing to meet his lover after a long separation. Sam hadn't quite understood, but she thought she could see now what he meant. Everything in this most other of Otherlands seemed to be something else turned wrong-way 'round.
She was grateful to spot the fires of the Gypsy camp at last. The more she looked at it, especially during the times it went dark, the more the Well came to resemble a cave, a burrow. She could imagine something as big as the mountaintop giant but even more disturbing suddenly climbing up out of its swirling depths. But the Gypsies, like the other fairy-tale denizens of the place, did not seem frightened of the Well at all. For them, the end of the world had become the occasion for reunion and even celebration. As she and !Xabbu made their way back across the base of the bluff and down into the camp they could hear music and singing voices.
Felix Jongleur had not joined them in their search. Sam had been grateful, although she thought it odd that such a sour, cold-eyed man would choose to remain in the Gypsy camp, surrounded by living stereotypes of carefree amusement. Now, as they came back through the outskirts of the camp, she saw him sitting by himself on the steps of one of the wagons, watching a trio of Gypsy women in long shawls dancing to a busy fiddle. She pulled !Xabbu in another direction: at the moment, she thought their hearts were both too heavy to deal with that terrible old man.
Azador had spotted them making their way across the camp and came to meet them. He had traded his travel-worn clothes for new ones, a colorful vest and puffy-sleeved white shirt. His black boots shone. He had even combed and oiled his hair, which gleamed nearly as brightly as his boots. With his splendid smile and chiseled jaw, he looked like something from a not-very-convincing netflick.
"There you are!" he called. "Come! There is music and good talk. We will wait until the Lady comes to us, then we will be saved."
As he led them through the settlement, which was made up of many little family camps, Sam wondered at how quickly his anger at even being thought a Gypsy had been replaced by a belonging that was almost religious. As she stared at the gathered Romany, and was occasionally stared at in return, she couldn't help feeling that they were all a lot like Azador—so extremely . . . Gypsy-ish, for lack of a better term . . . as to seem almost a joke. There were men with huge curling mustaches pounding out horseshoes on small anvils, and old women dressed entirely in black gossiping like crows on a wire. At the edge of the camp some of the others had set up games of chance and were busily fleecing all the interested non-Gypsies in the vicinity with dried peas hidden under fast-moving thimbles.
I guess this is what you get when you make your Gypsies out of old fairy tales, she thought.
Azador led them down close to the banks of the Well, where his own extended family had made their place. As he introduced his relations to her, most for the second time, a Romany parade of chats and chais and chabos, all dark flashing eyes and white flashing teeth, Sam found herself in danger of falling asleep on her feet. !Xabbu saw and took her by the arm, then asked Azador for a place where she could sleep. She was guided to one of the wagons by a clucking Gypsy granny who led her to a tiny bed scarcely bigger than a bookshelf. Sam wanted to protest that it was !Xabbu who needed the sleep even more than she did, but somehow she wound up lying down. Within seconds, it was too late to say anything.
If Sam dreamed, she did not remember the dreams when she awoke. She stumbled out and nearly fell down the wagon's steep steps. The old crone was gone. All around, Gypsies lay sleeping on the ground, as if the party had raged so long that they had dropped where they stood, but the sky was unchanged, still the same murky, bruised gray.
I miss time, she thought sadly. I miss mornings, and the sun, and . . . and everything.
Someone was singing, a low and quiet wandering in a minor key. She walked around the edge of the wagon to find !Xabbu squatting beside a guttering fire, drawing in the gray dust with the end of a piece of charred firewood as he sang. He looked up and offered her a weak, almost ghostly smile.
"Good morning, Sam. Or good evening."
"You can't tell, can you? Sometimes it feels like that's the most impacted part of this whole thing." She crouched on the ground beside him. "What are you drawing?"
"Drawing?" He looked down. "Nothing. I was only letting my arm move while I was thinking. Like dancing, perhaps, but not so tiring." He couldn't muster another smile, even for his own small joke,
"What are you thinking about?" She was fairly certain she already knew, but he surprised her.
"Jongleur." He looked around. "But before we talk, let us go somewhere more. . . ." He searched for the word.
"Private?"
"Exactly. Where we can see for a distance around us." He stood and led her between the wagons, past more smoky embers and more sleeping Gypsies, toward the bluff that loomed above the encampment, they climbed until they could sit on a small headland at the end of a long slope with the wagons a hundred meters below them. There were still people nearby, some even camped along the slope—not Gypsies, but fairy-tale folk, as Sam thought of them, talking cats and gingerbread children—but they seemed listlessly uninterested in the newcomers.
"What are you thinking about Jongleur?" Sam asked as they settled themselves.
"That there is some mystery between him and Azador I do not understand." !Xabbu frowned. "First there is the way he helped Azador lead us here. Then there is his interest in the Gypsy camp—this man, who has nothing but scorn for the other people and creatures he has met here."
"I know." Sam shrugged. "But maybe there's a simple explanation. He did build the network. It makes sense he might know some things about it we don't, and not want to tell us. He's not, like, Mister Generosity."
"True. But there is still something about it that puzzles me."
They sat watching the movements of the awakening Gypsy camp, as well as the larger crowd of people and semi-people surrounding the Well, a tent city of the not-quite-human. The weird, lunar landscape brought back Sam's fierce sense of homesickness.
"So are we really waiting here for the end of the world?" she asked.
"I do not know, Sam. But there is always hope. Have I told you the story of how the All-Devourer came to the kraal of Grandfather Mantis? That is a story about hope. I told it to Renie, because she is the Beloved Porcupine."
"What?" Despite the heaviness of her spirit, Sam was startled into a laugh.
!Xabbu nodded his head. "Yes, that is what Renie also did when I told her. Porcupine is the daughter-in-law of Grandfather Mantis, his favorite of all the First People. And she was the bravest of them all as well—even when Grandfather Mantis himself was overcome by fear, she kept her head and did what was necessary. That sounds like Renie, does it not?"
Sam looked at him fondly. "You really love her, don't you?"
He did not speak for a moment, but a complicated set of emotions played across his face. "My people do not have a word that has so many meanings as your English word 'love' Sam. I care for her very much. I miss her badly. I am very, very frightened and unhappy that we cannot find her. If I did not see her again, my life would always be smaller and more sad."
"Sounds like love to me. Do yo
u want to marry her?"
"I would like to . . . to try to have a life together, I think. Yes."
Sam laughed. "You may be from somewhere else, !Xabbu, but you've got the single-guy stuff down pretty well. Can't you just say it? You love her and you want to marry her."
He growled, but it was only mock-irritation. "Very well, Sam. It is as you say."
She guessed that his light-heartedness did not go very deep. "We'll find her, !Xabbu. She's here somewhere."
"I must believe it is so." He sighed. "I was going to tell you the story of the All-Devourer. It is frightening, but as I said, it is also a story of hope."
Sam settled in. "Go ahead."
!Xabbu was a good storyteller, active and involved. He changed voices for the different characters and punctuated the tale with broad gestures and even dancelike movements, leaping to his feet to show Porcupine journeying to her father's house, greedily scooping his hands toward his mouth as he portrayed the All-Devourer eating all that he found. When he crouched and said, in the flat, frightened voice of Mantis waiting for the monster, "Oh, daughter, why is it so dark when there are no clouds in the sky?" Sam truly felt the horror of seeing one's own sins come home at last.
When he had finished, she noticed that a few of the fairytale folk from the surrounding campsites had moved closer to listen. "That was wonderful, !Xabbu. But it's so scary!" It had not been the simple folktale she had expected. Something powerful that lurked in the unfamiliar images, in the confusion of motives, made her wish she understood better.
"But the story says there is light behind the greatest darknesses. Grandfather Mantis and his people survived and moved on." His face fell. "I thought that it was my job to preserve them, and with them the story of my people. I thought that was to be the work of my life, but I have done nothing to make it happen."
"You'll do it," she said, but !Xabbu's nod of agreement was perfunctory. She wanted to see him animated again, thinking about something other than Renie and their terrible situation. After all, it wasn't as if they were in a hurry anymore. They had nowhere else to go. "Can you tell me another one? Do you mind?"