by Tad Williams
Now the tears did come. Memories came with them—the nights she had sat awake in bed with Aleksandr sleeping beside her, convinced there was something wrong with her baby because what was inside her simply did not feel right. The other times when she would have sworn she could sense it . . . thinking inside her, the strange sensation of a little alien thing living inside her belly. But she had told herself the feelings were nothing that other mothers did not also experience and the doctors had agreed with her.
"How could you know all this?" she demanded. "How could you know? Why did you wait until now to tell me? You are making this up—this is some crazy game, it's your conspiracy, your crazy conspiracy!"
"No, Olga," he said sadly. "I didn't tell you because I didn't know. Until now, I had no idea how the Grail network's operating system worked, since it did not seem to function within any of the rules for even the most sophisticated neural networks. But. . . ."
"My baby!" Olga leaped up and staggered to the pod at the top of the pyramidal arrangement. The word Cryogenic had faded but it was burned in her mind. "Is he here? Is he in here?" She scratched uselessly at the plastic. "Where is he?"
"He is not there, Olga." Sellars sounded as though he too was fighting tears. "He is not in the building. He is not even on Earth."
Her legs buckled. She sagged and fell to the ground, thumping her forehead against the carpet. "What are you saying?" she moaned. "I don't understand."
"Please, Olga. Please. I'm so sorry. But I have to tell you everything. We have very little time."
"Time? I have thought for most of my life that my baby was dead, now you tell me I have no time? Why? What are you doing?"
"Please. Just listen." Sellars took a deep, shaky breath. "Jongleur and his technicians built the Grail system around your child. His problem . . . his gift, whatever you call it, the hypermutation that would otherwise have killed him long before he came to term—and perhaps would have killed you, too—made him ideal for the Grail's purposes. With all their work to prepare a world where they could spend eternity, they still could not create a virtual environment responsive and realistic enough, not with the best information technologies of the day. What good would it have been to them to make themselves immortal if they did not have a suitable place to spend that immortality? So Jongleur and his scientists created a massively parallel processor constructed of human brains—fetal brains, mostly—and relied on your son's native abilities to make connections between those brains that no machinery could make, to dominate and shape them into the operating system for their network.
"But there were problems from the very beginning. The human brain is not a computer. It needs to do human things to grow. If it doesn't learn, it doesn't physically develop. Your son was a one-in-a-billion oddity, Olga, but he was still a Human child. In order to develop this incredibly powerful resource, the Grail engineers and scientists discovered that they had to teach it—had to let it come into contact with other human minds, learn to communicate, even to reason after a fashion, or it would be useless to them.
"Paradoxically, the Grail people only exposed him to human ideas in order to make him the most efficient machine possible. They had no interest in his true humanity. And in the end, that is what killed them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in his voice.
"So early on, in order to help him develop, they began experiments in which they brought him into contact with other children, normal children. One of the people inside the system now, a woman named Martine Desroubins, was one of those children. She knew your son only as a voice—but she knew him."
Olga had stopped crying now. She sat against the pod staring at her hands. "I don't understand any of this. Where is he now? What have they done to him?"
"They have used him, Olga. For thirty years, they have used him. I am sorry to tell you this—I beg you to believe that—but they have not used him kindly. He has been raised in the dark, figuratively and literally. He does not even know what he is—he acts almost without thinking, half-awake, dreaming, confused. He has the powers of a god but the understanding of an autistic child."
"I want to go to him! I don't care what he is!"
"I know. And I know that when you speak to him you will be kind. You will try to understand."
"Understand what?" She was breathing hard now, squeezing her fingers into fists. A fire ax, she thought. There must be a fire ax somewhere. I will take it and I will smash this man Jongleur's black coffin to bits, drag him out into the light like a worm from its hole. . . .
"You son is not . . . a normal human. How could he be? He speaks almost entirely through others. Somehow, he has connected to the Tandagore coma children. I do not understand that part yet, but. . . ."
"Speaks through . . . others. . . ?"
"Children . . . the children in your dreams. I think they are his voice, trying to talk to you."
Olga felt her heart skip. "He . . . he knows me?"
"Not truly. but I think he sensed something about you. Didn't you say that what first made you suspicious was that none of the affected children were viewers of your program? Your son escaped the bounds of the Grail network some time ago—he has explored much, and I suspect that he was drawn particularly to the children watching your show, as he has been drawn to other children elsewhere. What it was he sensed in you, I don't know, but he may have felt some deep affinity, some . . . similarity to himself. Wordless, uncomprehending, he immediately lost any other interest in your child viewers. Instead, he tried in his half-conscious way to . . . make contact. With you."
She was sobbing convulsively but her eyes were dryly painful, as though she had cried so much she could never shed tears again. Those terrible headaches, the confusing voices, they hadn't been a curse at all, but. . . ." My ch–child! My baby! Trying to f–f–find me!"
"Time is very short, Olga. We have only minutes, then things will have gone too far. I will try to bring him to you—let you speak to him yourself. Do not be too frightened."
"I would never be frightened. . . !"
"Wait. Wait until you have spoken to him. He was born different, but even his raw humanity has been shaped by cold, self-serving men. And now another man, even crueler, has hurt him and abused him until he has nearly given up. It may be too late. But if you can speak to him, calm him, many lives can be saved."
"I still don't understand. Where is he?" She looked around wildly, imagining some strange, Frankensteinian form might suddenly appear from the shadows that cloaked the huge room. "I want to go to him. I don't care what he is, what he looks like. Let me go to him!"
"You must listen carefully, Olga." Sellars sounded even more strained, as though he were clinging to a high place by his fingernails. "Time is short. There is still a lot I haven't told you, crucial things. . . ."
"Then tell me now!"
And as she sat in the big, dark room, the only moving thing in the circle of light, he told her as kindly as possible where her son was and what he was doing. Then he left her alone so he could see to the rest of his own desperate agenda.
Olga had thought she had no more tears left to cry. She had been wrong.
The intruder was still talking to someone—someone Jongleur couldn't see. Immersed in protective fluids, he writhed in impotent fury. He tried to bring up the room audio but again he discovered himself blocked, the commands disabled. He knew it must be his ex-employee who had done all this, but why should that street animal go to such ridiculous lengths just to confuse him?
Jongleur stared at the screen with the intensity of a mad thing, an old falcon who lived only to strike at anything that moved. The woman's lips were moving—what was she saying? Damn her, is she talking to Dread?
He watched the woman begin to cry again, shuddering, pulling at her face with her hands, and his distant heart was again chilled. She knew. Somehow, she had found out. Which meant that his enemies knew as well, for who else would tell her?
Why bring this woman into it? What does he think she can possibly
accomplish?
She was standing over his pod now—his pod, only a few short meters from the rags and tatters of his living body. He switched cameras so he could see her face, which was grotesque with rage and misery. She made a fist and struck the pod—a tiny, meaningless blow on the hardened plasteel, but Felix Jongleur suddenly felt himself suffocating, his fear twisting ever tighter. There were strangers in his home—he was violated. Pursued. Caught.
No! I won't let it happen. A dozen possible reprisals flashed through his mind, all thwarted by the evacuations and the meddling in his system. Even his last-ditch defenses had been rendered inoperative. He could not flood the room with immobilizing gas or crippling sonics.
I won't let it happen!
It came to him suddenly, but he could not at first decide if it was genius or complete madness. Months—they had been immobilized for almost twenty-four months. Would it work? It would—it had to. He triggered a massive dose of adrenaline to be administered to both of them. It would work. He knew it would. He was excited now, his pulse suddenly racing with feverish glee instead of terror. What was the release sequence? If that much adrenaline hit them and they couldn't get out, they would thrash themselves to death—damage the breathing masks and drown in the suspension fluid.
There. He selected the commands. In the window in his mind, the system brought up the life signs, the graphs already spiking as they rose toward something like normal function, then moved on beyond, fueled by the adrenal surge. He brought up the view of the room again, the heedless woman sitting obliviously on the floor of his sanctum sanctorum between his own helpless body and the last remnants of Ushabti, the terrible mistake that had destroyed his beautiful Avialle.
Violated. She has. . . .
"There is an intruder just steps away from you," he told his servants, making the words thunder in their ears so they would retain them even in the confusion of waking to their real bodies for the first time in two years. "Take her and hurt her and find out what she knows. Do this and afterward you may remain free."
The indicator lights blinked, then blinked again as the lids of the two black pods slowly began to rise.
CHAPTER 45
Send
* * *
NETFEED/OBITUARY: Robert Wells, Founder of TMX
(visual: Wells at Telemorphix "torchlight rally" company meeting)
VO: Robert Wells, techology pioneer and one of the world's richest men, died of a heart attack yesterday. Wells, the founder of the Telemorphix Corporation, was one hundred and eleven years old.
(visual: Owen Tanabe, Wells' executive assistant)
TANABE: "He went out the way he would have wanted-at the office, plugged into the net, working right up until the last moment on ways to improve human life. Even though he's gone, all of us will be feeling the impact of Bob Wells' personal vision for years to come. . . ."
* * *
He was laughing, laughing out loud. He couldn't help it. His heart was aflame with exhilaration, his thoughts swirling like smoke and sparks. He was as alive as he had ever been—it was like the last moment of the hunt, drawn out by some hallucinatory distortion of time into an hours-long orgasm.
The chorus in his head had reached a crescendo. Camera in close. Face flushed but coldly handsome. The winner. Unstoppable.
All his enemies inside the network were at his fingertips now, hopelessly trapped—the blind woman, Jongleur, the Sulaweyo bitch, even the operating system itself. They cowered before him. He was the destroyer, the beast, the devil-devil man. He was a god.
And outside the network. . . ?
Pull back to reveal his enemies at his feet. Long shot. Only one standing.
Dread looked down at the two bodies on the floor of the loft. Dulcie lay silent in a tangle of arms and legs like a puppet with its strings slashed, blood pooling around her. The policewoman was still moving, but only a little, her head twitching in time with her swift, jerky breathing, bright red arterial blood frothing on her lips. He frowned. Even in the flaring majesty of the moment he remembered his mantra against overconfidence.
Dread muted his inner music, then bent and rolled the policewoman onto her side. She gave a little whistling grunt but otherwise did not respond, even when he wiggled the handle of the knife in her back. A shame to leave her unattended in the last moments, but he had bigger game afoot. She wasn't his type, anyway—he didn't like them stocky. He reached down into her overcoat, found the holstered Glock, and pulled it out. He put the barrel against the policewoman's head, then remembered that even after he returned to the network her final moments would be recorded on the loft's surveillance cameras.
Why waste a slow death? he thought. Dulcie's end had turned out to be a bit disappointingly swift, after all.
He considered briefly, then ejected the bullets from the policewoman's gun and Dulcie's snapped-together pistol and tucked both weapons into the pockets of his robe. He reached back into the woman's breast pocket and found her police pad. Sorry, sweetness, no calls. He ground it under his heel until he heard components shatter, then kicked it across the room.
No sense in putting temptation in the way of a dying woman, he thought cheerfully. Women just couldn't resist temptation—pretty things, bright colors, false hopes. They were like animals that way.
He climbed back onto the coma bed and frowned at the blood he was smearing on the purity of the white surfaces. Can't be helped. Fix it in editing. Then again, maybe it would be a nice effect. . . ? He ran a quick check to make sure the cameras would pick up everything that happened in the loft, and that he himself would have a view of it even when he was back on the network. Confident, cocky, lazy, dead, right? Not this boy.
Dread brought his music back up, a swell of triumphant strings and kettledrums. The chorus came in again, hundreds of voices singing in the bones of his skull as he dropped back into the universe he had conquered.
Paul could only stare at the spot where Felix Jongleur had stood a moment before. One second the ancient man had been there, then he had simply vanished—pop, like a soap bubble.
T4b was the first to speak. He sounded lost, younger than Paul had ever heard him. "Old Grail-knocker . . . won, him? Just . . . over? All over?"
Sam Fredericks was crying. Beside her, Orlando Gardiner put a muscular barbarian arm around her shoulder. "I knew it!" she said for the fourth or fifth time. "So impacted—we were all so stupid! He was just waiting!"
Paul could only nod in stunned agreement. I should have seen it coming—should have known a device like that lighter would be worth something to someone—to Jongleur. But he had let himself be lulled by Jongleur's unusual volubility, his surrender of secrets. The old man had acted like someone without hope. Paul had recognized the feeling, and so he had believed it.
"We may have only moments," Martine said softly.
"It's in God's hands," said Bonita Mae Simpkins. "We don't know what He has planned."
It is out of our hands, Martine replied, that is the one certain thing."
Florimel stood. "No. I cannot believe that. I will not give up my life, my daughter's life, without a fight."
"Who are you going to fight?" Paul's own misery made it difficult even to speak. "We underestimated him. Now he's gone. And even if something keeps him from shutting down the system, what about that?" He pointed to the dome of clouds, the silhouette of Dread moving along the edge like a shadow-puppet demon. "What about him?"
"Where has the boy gone?" asked Nandi. "Sellars' boy. He was frightened. He ran."
Orlando pointed. "Over there."
Paul could see Cho-Cho crouched on the rim of the Well, a small shadow against the flickering lights. "I'll get him," he said heavily. He knew what it was to be lost and confused. We should face it together, as Martine said.
"Something is happening." Martine Desroubins' face tightened in concentration. Paul hesitated, but then turned to go after the boy.
The end, he thought. The end is happening, that's all.
The we
akening glare of the Well made him think of Ava as she had last appeared, suffering, fighting hopelessly against the inevitable. I'm sorry, he told her memory. Whatever you were, whoever, it doesn't matter. You risked everything for me—lost everything. And I failed you.
The boy was on all fours, shuddering. When Paul touched him he scrambled back along the edge, making Paul fear he might tumble into the Well.
But what difference does it make, really? Still, he put out his hand. "It's all right, lad. It's all right. I'm one of the good guys." And that's a laugh, isn't it?
"He here," the boy said.
"No, he's gone. The man is gone."
"He not! He in my head, verdad!"
Paul paused, his hand still stretched toward the boy. "What are you talking about?"
"El viejo! Sellars! He in my head—I can hear him!" The boy backed a little farther along the rim of the pit, keeping well out of Paul's reach. "It hurts!"
My God, Paul thought. Just don't scare him into falling. He squatted down, then extended his hand again. "We can help you. Please come back." What if he falls? What if he falls and we never find out? "What is Sellars saying to you?"
"Don't know! Can't understand—it hurts my head! He want . . . he want . . . want you to listen. . . ." The boy began to cry, then rubbed his face angrily as if to push the tears back into the ducts. "Leave me alone, m'entiendes?" It was hard to tell who he was shouting at.