by Tad Williams
"Chance not, lady," the little boy said sullenly. "You people loco."
Martine and the others reached the bottom just as Paul and Bonnie Mae finally got onto their feet. Paul felt so weary and sore he immediately wanted to lie back down. He had questions, lots of questions, but no strength to ask them.
"As to where we are," Martine said, "I think we are inside the operating system."
"But I thought we'd been inside it along, more or less."
"No." She shook her head. "We have been inside the Grail network, and the operating system extends throughout that network like invisible nerves. But I think now we are inside the operating system itself, or at least some private preserve of its own, kept safe from all its masters, Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, and now Dread."
"Renie said . . . she was in the heart of the system," Paul remembered.
"How can you know such a thing?" Nandi said sharply. "It makes some sense, but it can only be a guess."
"Because I touched the Other before it brought us through," she said. "It did not speak to me in words, but I could still understand much. And because we have been to a place like this before. Twice, although the first version, the Patchwork World, was unfinished. I failed to understand the similarity on the last occasion, but I am now seeing the patterns for a third time."
"We've been here . . . before?" Paul examined the naggingly familiar terrain,
"Not here, but something much like it—a place built for us to meet our host on neutral ground. You were not with us for the first one, Paul Jonas, but you must remember the second."
"The mountain!"
"Exactly." Martine showed him a ghostly smile. "And I hope that we will again find the Other waiting for us. Maybe this time we will understand how to speak to it."
"So where are we going?" Florimel asked. "The hills look like they're a little lower heading that way. . . ."
"They are," Martine said shortly. "But we do not need the hills or the slope of the ground to know. I can perceive a great concentration of data waiting out there, something alive and active and unparalleled, just as I could feel it waiting on the mountaintop." For a moment she looked very tired and fearful. "That is not quite true. It seems different this time—smaller, weaker. I . . . I think that the Other is dying."
"How can that be?" Florimel demanded, "It's just an operating system—it's code!"
"But if it like, sixes out, what happens to us?" asked T4b.
Martine shook her head. "I do not know, but I fear the answers." She led the others across the shallow valley and up the slope of the nearest hill. They had walked only a few hundred meters when Paul felt a prickling on the back of his neck,. as if something were following him. He whirled but he could see nothing behind him in the colorless hills. Still, something troubled the air, a tension, a tightening of pressure, that made him reluctant to turn his back again.
Martine also swung around, slowly, searchingly. She found a direction and cocked her head to listen for a moment.
"Run," she said.
"What are you. . . ?" Florimel began, then the sky split open.
From nowhere, winds howled down on them and the ground trembled. The trembling became general, the air and the earth all vibrating in shuddering synchronization, then something huge appeared on the hilltop they had just deserted, something vague and dark and beastlike. Heat lightning crackled around its misshapen head. The thing was on its knees, howling in rage and what sounded like pain, a barking roar that made Paul's ears throb. More winds came shrieking through the hills flinging horizontal dust, so that he had to cover his eyes with his hands and peer through the cracks in his fingers.
"I told you, run!" Martine screamed. "It's Dread! He followed us through!"
The vast figure on the hillside writhed in pain; its howl rose in pitch. "Something's fighting him!" Paul shouted. "The system! It's fighting back!"
"The system is going to lose!" Martine grabbed his arm and yanked him forward, leading him a few stumbling steps up the hill. The Wicked Tribe blew past, squealing helplessly on the breast of a gale wind. Paul turned to grab at Bonnie Mae, who had fallen; when he dared a look back he could see the immense, murky figure struggling to rise to its feet, outscreaming the storm winds, the lightning now flashing and snapping around its misshapen head.
Paul turned away from the sight and began to run. Behind him the roar of the beast rose and rose until all the world seemed to vibrate to a single animal cry of rage. The sky darkened. Overhead, the stars began to die.
Dulcie's heart was hammering.
What's he doing? What was he so worked up about? I've never seen him like that, even in the middle of the Atasco raid. Whatever it is, it's not even something real—it's something in the network, for Christ's sake. So why was he screaming at me?
She carefully closed her pad, waiting for her pulse to slow. He's not watching you, she told herself. She glanced at Dread's body, motionless except for the slow roll of the bed's machinery, but knew it proved nothing. He could be observing her through hidden cameras—maybe even through her own pad.
No, she told herself sharply. That's bullshit. Through the wallscreen, maybe, but he can't get into my own system—I have better security than most governments. If he was capable of that kind of gearwork he wouldn't need me in the first place.
Dulcie knew she wasn't going to be able to work until her nerves stopped twitching. She started the water boiling for a cup of Earl Grey. The old-fashioned way was slow, but she'd tried instant hot-pack tea. Once had been enough.
He doesn't know what you're doing, she told herself. And as long as you're careful, he's not going to. Just clean everything up.
But a more cautious side of her was not mollified. Why are you even doing it? Is it a challenge? Do you have to break into his private files just to prove you're better than him?
No, she decided. I have to do it because it's something he doesn't want people to know about—doesn't want me to know about. It's worth something to him, and if I can crack it and copy it, then maybe I have a bargaining chip. Something that will help me make a deal to get out of here safely.
Also, I'm tired of being kept in the dark.
When the tea was ready and her hands were steadier she took the cup and returned to the chair and small table she had set up in one corner of the loft. She could hear people laughing on the street below, music blaring from cars. She reflected wistfully on how much nicer it would be if she had been born a sensible young woman, someone who would be out with friends on a Saturday night instead of sitting in a silent loft with black-out curtains on the windows, playing caretaker to a moody, violent bastard like Dread.
She took a sip of tea and stared at her pad screen. Whatever password Dread was using had resisted every attempt. It was infuriating, almost unbelievable. A password? Even the most garbled collection of numbers and letters should eventually roll up as a combination on her random character generator, but for some reason it hadn't happened. And now that she had found a new bit of back-alley crypto gear to sniff out the shape of the password—nine characters—it was even more frustrating that she couldn't solve it.
In fact, it almost seemed impossible. Nine characters! It only took a short time for the gear to go through every possible combination of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks, but again and again it came up with nothing that would open the door to Dread's metaphorical locked room.
Remembering the lab tape and the strange, blurred experiment footage, she had also tried every variant on what she felt sure was his name, John Wulgaru. The gear should have generated the same things randomly as part of its algorithm, but she could not help feeling certain that the things he kept so scrupulously hidden, like his name and background, would have some connection to other things he wanted to keep secret from the world, for instance this bit of mysterious storage. But his name had not provided the key either, and before Dread had so unexpectedly and alarmingly interrupted her she had been inputting names from Aboriginal mythol
ogy, even though they too should already have been created by the near-infinite patience of the crypto gear.
Dulcie stared at the pad, then back at Dread's supine form, his dark Buddha face. It didn't make sense. Nine characters, but she had worked on it for hours without result. There was something she was missing—but what?
On a hunch, she went looking in her toolbox for a piece of gear she didn't often use, a strange little tangle of code even more esoteric than the one which had determined how many characters were in the password. A Malaysian hacker with whom she occasionally did business had traded it to her for a set of Asian bank personnel files she had downloaded while assisting a hostile takeover that ultimately failed. The would-be corporate pirates had been jailed in Singapore, and one of them had even been executed. Dulcie had made sure she would never be connected with the incident, but she hadn't been paid either, so she had been happy to unload the files anonymously and get something for them.
The bit of code she had received in return, which her Malaysian friend had called "Stethoscope," was not the most broadly employable piece of gear she'd ever owned, but it had its uses. What it did best was to locate extremely small changes in processing speed—things that would never show up at the interface level of the system, but which could be used to discover potential bugs before they became larger problems. Not being in the gear-creation business, Dulcie had never used it for its intended purpose, but she had occasionally found it useful for locating flaws in the security of systems she wished to attack. She hadn't used it for almost a year before the Australia trip but it had proved very handy during Dread's incursion into the Grail system. Now something—hacker's intuition, perhaps—suggested it might serve a purpose again.
Because there has to be something else going on, Dulcie told herself as she put Stethoscope to work.
She started up the random-character generator again so the gear would have something to analyze, then sat back to sip her tea. She had almost forgotten the bolt of fear that had shot through her when Dread had burst shouting onto her screen. Almost.
Three minutes later the character-generation cycle had finished, as unsuccessfully as it had the other two dozen times. She opened the Stethoscope report and felt her heart quicken. There was something, or it certainly looked that way: a small hesitation, a minute hitch, as though Dread's system security had paused for a moment. Which, she guessed, meant that the security program had seen part of what it wanted, done a check, not found whatever else it needed to open access, and rebuffed the overture.
Dulcie bit her lip, thinking. It had to be some kind of double password—first X, then Y. But if the generator had given a prompt for the second password? Why hadn't the system stopped and waited? No human being could input fast enough to cough up another password in that microsecond of hesitation, even if it was spoken instead of typed.
Spoken. The back of her neck prickled. She checked Dread's system and felt a glow of triumph when she discovered, as she had guessed, that the audio input was turned off. That was it. The second password was supposed to be spoken after the first had been typed. The system had heard the first, checked for audio and found it disabled, so it had treated the whole thing as a failed attempt, all of this happening in a flash of time too small to be perceived by human senses.
She turned the audio on, reminding herself to be damn sure to turn it off again when she was finished—otherwise she might as well leave Dread a note saying she had been trying to hack his system—and began to patch together some modifications, hooking the character generator to the Stethoscope gear. When the hesitation came this time, the character generator would stop to be read, which should at least give her the first password.
She took another sip of tea, barely tasting it, then set the generator to work—in her mind's eye it was a roulette wheel, spinning so fast as to be almost invisible. In less than a minute it stopped, the letters "DREAMTIME" blinking in the log-in box. She recognized the word from her brief survey of Aboriginal mythology and felt a flush of triumph. This time, with the audio enabled, the system had recognized the first password and was waiting for the second.
But it's not going to wait very long, she suddenly realized, and the glow of victory faded. It's going to give me ten seconds, or twenty at the most, then it's going to shut off unless I say the right word. And the next time, or the time after that, when I don't give the right password, it's going to shut down for good—cut off all access, maybe even set off an alarm. It will certainly leave a damn clear mark that someone tried to get in.
She could never come up with the second password off the cuff, could think of nothing to try except "Wulgaru," which still seemed too obvious. And she could not generate could generate characters directly to the system, not even if she modified the character generator—which would take days anyway, maybe weeks of work in an area she knew almost nothing about.
Ten seconds gone. "DREAMTIME" still blinked on her screen, mocking her, but any moment now the window would close. She had worked so hard to solve the first part of the puzzle, but even though she had done it, she was stuck, fooled, foiled.
"Son of a bitch!" she said feelingly.
At the last word, the screen went blank. A moment later, "ACCESS GRANTED" flashed up and the door of Dread's hidden room opened.
The fifty-six files were ordered by date, the first over five years old and simply labeled "Nuba 1." She opened it and discovered it was sight-and-sound, but only 2D, not full wraparound. In many ways the quality was even worse than the lab experiment files. The whole thing had been shot by a single very primitive camera fixed in one place, like surveillance footage.
At first it was hard to make sense of it. The picture was extremely dark. She only realized after watching for half a minute that the concrete pillars in the foreground were some kind of outdoor structure, the support for a freeway ramp, perhaps, and the dark background near the top was actually night sky.
Movement near the base of one of the pillars, hidden in shadow despite a pool of light from what she guessed was a sodium lamp on the freeway above, proved eventually to be two human figures, although the human part was only an educated guess until at least a minute of the footage had passed. At first she thought the dark, indistinct shapes against one of the farther pillars were making love—first a hand, then a leg extended out into the light splashing down beside them. Then, with an indrawn breath of horror, she became sure that the larger one was strangling the former. But even that seemed not to be true, since after a moment the larger figure stood and the smaller was revealed to be still moving, slumped against the pillar but holding out its hands as though imploring the large one not to leave. The only sound in the file was the continuos rumble of traffic, muted and low, as though the camera were closer to the roadway than the events being viewed.
It was hard to see what happened next and harder still to understand why anyone should bother to make a record like this of it. The quality of the image was maddening, as though someone had found a way to reroute the footage from a security camera with a bad correction chip. Why? What did it all mean?
The larger figure leaned over the smaller, exhibiting something that shimmered palely for just a moment, catching a glint of the overhead light—a bottle? A knife? A folded piece of paper? The small figure seemed to be arguing or pleading, with much movement of hands, but Dulcie's bad feelings about the whole thing were eased a bit by the fact that the smaller one made no attempt to escape.
The larger shape knelt beside the smaller, holding it so close that again they appeared to be making love, or at least preparing to do so. For a long time—it was two minutes' worth of file but it seemed even longer—the two shadowy shapes were merged. Every now and then a hand would emerge again, waving slowly as though to the distant camera or to a departing train. Once the hand emerged, stretching to what must have been its greatest reach. The spread fingers slowly closed, like a flower shutting for the night, a movement almost beautiful in its simplicity.
At
last after many minutes the larger figure rose. The smaller still sat against the pillar, but before Dulcie could see anything more the footage ended.
Dulcie sat staring at her pad with a sour taste in her mouth. It was impossible to tell exactly what had been happening and it might take hours working with her enhancement gear before she'd even be able to guess. But whatever she was going to do, she should do it on her own time, on her own system. It was foolish sitting here with Dread's secrets exposed—better to copy everything, then deal with it on her own terms.
But she could not resist opening a few more files, just to see if everything Dread had stored so carefully was as ambiguous as what she had seen. She selected a few more, turning her attention first to one labeled "Nuba 8."
The images in Nuba 8 were much sharper, although they also seemed to have been downloaded from a security camera, this one on the stairwell of what looked like a large office or apartment building, also at night. The scene was lit by floodlights; the figure of a woman, when she emerged from the glass door with her purse under one arm and her keypad in her hand, was quite clear. She was young, perhaps Dulcie's age, dark-haired, slender. She paused on the bottom step and fumbled in her purse, withdrawing a cylinder that looked like some kind of chemical defense weapon, but even as she did so she looked up in startlement. A shadow moved in front of her, swift as a flitting bat; an instant later the stairwell was empty. The image jumped and changed, the footage now coming from a different camera in an underground parking lot, but the woman being shoved toward it by an indistinct figure in dark clothing was recognizably the same, even with her face disfigured by terror.
Disturbed as she was by this brief bit of horror flick—was this Dread's ugly, awful secret, that he collected snuff footage?—Dulcie was even more disgusted by herself than she was sickened by what she was watching.
It figures, she thought. The first guy I get interested in for months and he's into this kind of horrible shit. Thank God I didn't let him. . . .