by Tad Williams
"What are . . . what are we going to do?" she said, breath hitching quietly as she did her best not to sob.
"Try not to get killed. Or try not to get killed again, in my case." He pulled himself up into a sitting position. "Now tell me what happened after I died."
It caught her by surprise. She squeaked with laughter in spite of herself but it also left her feeling frighteningly hollow. "Damn you, Gardiner, don't do that to me."
He smiled. "Sorry. Some things don't change, I guess."
She caught up to him at the edge of the shoreline. Without saying a word she slipped her arm through his. He started a little at the unexpected contact but did not pull away. It was nice to be touched, he realized, and with that also realized that he was planning to live.
"I wasn't going to jump in," he said.
"I didn't think so," she told him. "But it would have been messy if you fell in by accident."
He turned and she pivoted neatly beside him. They moved along the shore.
"Tell me," she said. "Did it all come back this time?"
"More than I wanted," he said.
As he described his returned memories—his returned life, in fact—and Jongleur's bizarre explanations, he found himself feeling more than ever ashamed at his own timidity, at the way he had let the events of his former life carry him along with little resistance to such a terrible conclusion.
". . . And Ava—she was so young!" His hands were clenched into such tight fists that he knew Martine could feel the tremors in his arm. "How could I. . . ?"
"How could you what?" He was surprised to hear anger in her voice. "Offer her comfort? Do your best to help her in the middle of a bizarre, frightening, inexplicable situation? Did you try to seduce her?"
"No!"
"Did you take advantage of her ignorance—her sheltered innocence. . . ?"
"No, of course not. Not on purpose. But just by going along with it—just by continuing to be her teacher even when I knew the whole thing was somehow rotten. . . ."
"Paul." She tightened her grip on his arm. "Someone . . . a friend . . . told me something once. He was speaking of me, but he might have been speaking of you. 'You never avoid an opportunity to stare directly at the wrong things,' is what he said." She made a noise that might have been a laugh. Paul found himself wondering for the first time what the real Martine looked like and was saddened that her blindness made her image bland and unremarkable. "It was an even wittier epigram originally, of course," she said. "Because of the bit about staring."
"He sounds cruel."
"I thought so at the time, and I valued him for it—I was very cynical in my student days. But I think now he just did not yet have the strength to be gentle." She smiled. "We may all be in our last hours, Paul Jonas. Do you really want to spend them trying to remember the many things you may have done wrong?"
"I suppose not."
They walked for a while in silence beside the dimly pulsing Well.
"It's hard," he said. "I've been thinking all along that somehow I'd find her . . . save her. Or perhaps that she'd save me."
"You are speaking of . . . Ava?" she asked him carefully.
He nodded. "But there is no Ava. Not really. Avialle Jongleur is dead, and all that's left are fragments. Held together by the Other, I suppose, but she's not quite real. Like trying to reassemble a puzzle without having all the right pieces. In its way, the Other must have loved her more than anyone else did—certainly more than her so-called father did. More than I did. She was its angel."
Martine did not reply.
"There's something else," he said after a moment. "Jongleur told me that as far as he knows, my body's still alive."
"Do you think he is lying?"
"No. But I don't think it's my body anymore."
Martine paused, "What do you mean, Paul?"
"I've been thinking—during the few moments something hasn't been actively trying to kill us, that is." He made the effort to smile. "Those very few moments. And I believe I know what happened when Sellars got me out of that World War One simulation. See, as long as the Grail people had my body, they also had my mind. Sellars—and Ava—could only talk to me when I was dreaming. But somehow, I escaped the simulation."
"And you think. . . ."
"I think that I've been through the Grail Brotherhood's ceremony—that my consciousness has been split off somehow, the way they planned to do for themselves. Perhaps it was an accident—I don't know why they would have made a virtual mind for me like they did for all the Grail people. But I think it did happen, and Sellars somehow brought that virtual mind to life. And that second, virtual Paul Jonas . . . is me."
She said nothing, but clutched his arm more tightly.
"So all the things I left behind, the simple, silly things that have kept me going here when I wanted to lie down and die, my flat, my mediocre job, my entire old life . . . they don't belong to me. They belong to the real Paul. The one whose body is in a lab somewhere. Even if that body dies, I can never have them. . . ."
He fell silent for a while. It hurt too much to talk. They walked on along the desolate shoreline.
"What is that line from T. S. Eliot?" he said when he trusted himself to speak. "Something about, 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling on the floors of silent seas. . . .' "
She turned her sightless face toward him. "Are you criticizing yourself again?"
"Actually, I was talking about the landscape." He stopped. "It does seem like the kind of place to wait for the end of the world, doesn't it?"
"I am tired of waiting for the end of the world," she said, but her head was cocked at a strange angle.
"Well, I don't think we have a lot of choice," he began. "Dread is still waiting just outside, and even if Orlando took care of the Twins I don't think he's up to dealing with what Dread's become. . . ."
"I suspect you are right. The Other has played its knight and it has bought some time, but nothing else."
"Its. . . ?"
"Its knight. Do you remember the story of the boy in the well? One of his would-be saviors was a knight. I suspect the Other had Orlando picked out for that role from the beginning." She frowned and raised her hand. "Quiet for a moment, please. Stand still."
"What is it?" Paul asked after a short silence.
"The waters are receding." She pointed. "Can you see it?"
"Whatever it is, it's not visible to me." But he wondered if in fact the lights were not already a little dimmer.
"I can feel the whole thing failing," she said distractedly. "Like an engine that has run too long. The end is coming very fast now I think."
"What can we do?"
She listened silently for long moments. "Nothing, I fear. Go back to the others and wait with them." She turned toward him. "But first I must ask you something. Will you hold me, Paul Jonas? Just for a short while? It has been a long time for me. I would not . . . would not like to die . . . without touching someone first."
He put his arms around her, full of conflicted thoughts. She was small, at least in this incarnation; her head fit just beneath his chin, her cheek against his chest. He wondered what her heightened senses would make of the quickness of his heartbeat.
"Perhaps in another world," she said, the words muffled against him. "In another time. . . ."
Then they just held each other and did not speak. At last they let go and went back side by side across the gray dust, toward the fire where their friends were waiting.
CHAPTER 43
Tears of Ra
* * *
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Porn Star Ignores Protests Over Planned Children's Interactive
(visual: Violet in excerpt from "Ultra Violet")
VO: Adult interactive actress Vondeen Violet says she doesn't understand the controversy over her intention to produce what she calls "educational interactives" about sex for the under-twelve crowd.
VIOLET: "Kids need to learn and they'll find it out somehow. Isn't it better they
learn from a nonviolent interactive where they will participate with trained professionals like myself, instead of getting their information in the schoolyard or on the street? I mean, these things were written by a doctor, for God's sake!"
* * *
"I see it," said Catur Ramsey, "but I don't really believe it."
"I am here," Olga told him. "And I'm not sure that I believe it either."
Ramsey sat back and rubbed his tired eyes, half certain that any moment now he would wake up and the whole bizarre day would prove to have been a dream. But when he looked at the screen again the feed from Olga Pirofsky's camera ring still showed the same improbable, fish-eye view.
"It's a forest," he said. "You walk out of the elevator onto the top floor and into . . . a forest?"
"Dead," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Look." The viewpoint swung upward and now Ramsey could see that most of the branches were bare. Even the evergreens were almost all dead, with only a few clusters of brown needles remaining on the skeletal limbs. The camera ring swung down again. Ramsey could see Olga's legs wading through knee-high drifts of brown and gray leaves, squeezing up puffs of dry dust. The picture stopped moving as Olga paused to kick some of the cover aside, then the viewpoint swung across an expanse of black speckled with white,
"What is it?" Ramsey asked. "I can't make it out."
"I think it was a stream," she said. "It's mud now. Almost completely dry." The viewpoint moved closer until Ramsey could see that the white streaks were arranged in familiar shapes.
"Are those fish?"
"They were."
Her tone was conversational, but Ramsey heard something in it he didn't like—something close to despair. "Come down, Olga. I've got Beezle in my other ear telling me they're almost done evacuating the building. We probably only have minutes to get you out."
"I see something." A moment later the camera swung up. Ramsey could see it too, now. It was an even stranger sight on the top floor of a skyscraper than the dead trees and fish skeletons,
"A house? A house?"
"I'm going to go look."
"I wish you wouldn't." Ramsey opened his other line. "I can't get her to leave yet, Beezle. How much time do we have?"
"You're asking me? Sellars set it up so this whole thing would be screwed up on purpose—misleading alarms, rerouted communications, you name it. There's even some kind of reactor alert going out. The army could be there in five minutes or no one may come near the place for days."
"Reactor alert? There's a reactor? Jesus. Just keep letting me know what's happening, will you?"
Beezle snorted. "When I know anything, you'll know it too."
The view on Ramsey's pad screen was too vertiginous to watch just now: Olga's hand was swinging up and down as she pushed her way through the overgrown vegetation. He closed his eyes. "How big is that forest?" he asked her. "Can you see anything else? What's over your head?"
"Nothing. Just a big white ceiling at least fifty meters up." The picture settled as she towered the ring to show him the house, much larger now. "Can you see it?"
"You can't just walk in, Olga. What if someone's in there?"
"You obviously can't see it very well," she said, but didn't explain. Ramsey found himself holding his breath as she made her way across the ragged brown remains of what might once have been a large and very nice garden.
"It is not too American-looking, this house," Olga said. "It looks like a European manor house—a small one. I saw many like it when I was younger."
"Just be careful."
"You worry too much, Mr. Ramsey. No one has lived here for some time, I think." The viewpoint swung forward as she reached for the door. "But who did live here? That is the question."
The door creaked open. Ramsey heard it clearly enough down her channel to know that the silence that followed it was just as real. "Olga? Are you okay?"
"It is . . . quite empty." She moved out of what seemed a narrow hallway and gave him a slow, sweeping view of the front room. The windows were shuttered, the room dark. Ramsey adjusted the brightness and resolution on his picture but still could make out little beyond the broad shapes of antique furnishings.
"I can't see much. What's there?"
"Dust," she said distantly. "There is dust on everything. The furniture, it seems quite old. Like something from two or three centuries ago. The carpet is dusty too, but I see no footprints. No one has been here in a long, long time." There was a long pause. "I do not like it here. I do not like the feeling."
"Then get out, Olga. Please. I already told you. . . ."
"I wonder who lived here? The man Felix Jongleur? But what trouble, to build something like this on top of his building when he could have had a real New Orleans mansion on the ground, with real gardens, real orchards. . . ."
"He's rich and probably crazy, Olga. That combination produces a lot of odd things."
"Whoever lived here, it was a sad place." The viewpoint moved along the wall, past a tabletop full of framed pictures; Ramsey saw grim faces in high collars. "A haunted house. . . ."
"Time to go, Olga."
"I think you are right. I do not like it here. But I will look into some of the rooms first."
Ramsey held his tongue, but barely. He had no control over her, only the ability to suggest—it wouldn't do any good to give her an ultimatum he couldn't back up. Still, her weird, unhurried mood was making him very tense.
"Dining room—look, there is still a table setting. Just one. As if someone simply did not come home for their meal." The viewpoint wandered across dusty plates and silver. The glassware was furred with cobwebs. "It is like Pompeii. Have you ever been there, Mr. Ramsey?"
"No."
"A strange place, Even the most ordinary things become magical in the right situations."
She wandered through a few more rooms. When she found what was clearly a girl's bedroom with its shelf of cobwebbed but wide-eyed dolls, she broke her long silence. "Now I will leave. It is too pitiful, whatever this was."
Ramsey did not say anything, not wanting to interfere with her resolution. He stayed quiet as she made her way back outside and into the barren garden.
"Olga. . . ?" he finally said as she lingered in front of a dry stone fountain.
"The children—they are not on this floor." She sighed. "There is nothing in that place, nothing left."
"I know. . . ."
"So there is one more place I must look," she said.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"There is a floor between this one and the room with all the machines," she said. "I will look there, too."
"Olga, you don't have time. . . !"
"I have nothing but time, Mr. Ramsey. Catur. All my life has come to this—this place, this moment." Even through the dreamy tone her voice was firm. "I have time."
"I seem to have forgotten the way to the elevator," she said at last. She had not bothered to lift the ring for many minutes; Ramsey's only view was of the camera swinging back and forth over the ground, across the leaves and the humped, desiccated roots and parched ground.
"Beezle," he said on the other line, "which way should she go?"
"Jeez, I don't know," the agent rasped. "I don't have the maps for this floor. But the wall's circular and there's probably a walkway all around the outside, like there was just outside the elevator. Just tell her to keep going straight. She'll hit it sooner or later."
"Sooner or later?" Ramsey closed his eyes again and took a deep breath. "Good God, am I the only person who's in a hurry around here?" But he relayed the message to Olga.
Beezle was right. Within a few hundred paces she stepped onto a floor of polished wood and found the wall at the end of the dead forest. "Which direction?" she asked.
"Beezle says take your pick."
She turned right, following the featureless curve. After a moment, she slowed, then stopped. Maddeningly, Ramsey could still only see her feet.
"What is it?"
The viewpoint swung up. A vast square of darkly transparent plastic had been set into the wall. Through it he could just make out a dim suggestion of the roofs of buildings far below and for a moment he thought it was only another window, but the crudeness of the way adhesive foam had been splashed around its edges suggested it was a late and rather cursory repair to the now-decayed but careful work elsewhere on the floor,
"I can . . . can feel them."
It took him a moment to understand her. "The . . . the voices? You can feel them?"
"Faintly." He heard her laugh a little. "I know, you are now finally convinced of what I have tried to tell you so long. I am mad. But I can feel them, just a little." She was silent for a moment. "Not good. It is another sad place—different from inside the house, even worse. Not good."
She began moving again. "But whatever happened there, it is not what brought me here," she added. Ramsey was chilled by her casual tone, her certainty.
"But . . . you felt them?"
"I felt ghosts, Mr. Ramsey."
She found the elevator and summoned it with her badge. When she had stepped in and the door had shut behind her, Ramsey moved to his other line.
"She's taking forever, Beezle—she's going to the next floor down to look there, too. How are we doing? Firefighters show up yet?" The agent did not reply. "Beezle?"
"I had to cut in and I'm afraid I've lost him," said a voice that was definitely not Beezle. "Things are a bit . . . difficult at the moment."
"Sellars?"
"Barely, but yes."
It was unquestionably his voice but there was something eerie about it, a jittering tension beneath the calm. Ramsey thought he sounded like a man holding the live ends of a fifty thousand volt electrical cable. "Jesus, what's going on?"
"It's a long story. I see Olga is still in the tower. . . ."
"Yes, and I can't get her to leave. We've tricked up all the alarms, all the stuff you set up, but the authorities are probably going to be breaking in the doors any moment now and I keep telling her to get out, but she won't listen—she's still wandering around looking for the children, you know, the voices in her head. . . ."