by Tad Williams
Paul risked turning away for a moment so he could wave to some of his companions to come and help, but he could not tell if anyone had seen him. "Cho-Cho—that's your name, right? Come back with me. That man who tried to hurt you is gone. Sellars can tell us how to get out of here—how we can all get out of here. You want that, don't you?"
"Mentiroso," the boy snarled. "Heard what you said before. All gonna die here."
"Not if Sellars can help us." He inched a little closer. "Please, just come with me. I won't touch you, I promise. No one will touch you. I'll just turn and walk back to the others, and you walk with me." The boy crawled a little farther away. Paul looked around, but none of the others were coming, although a few were watching with a kind of glazed curiosity. "Look. I'm getting up now and I'm going back to the fire. You come with me if you want. We're friends here." Who is this boy, anyway? What can I say to him that will convince him? "There really are people in the world who want to help, you know. There really are."
He waited a few seconds, but the boy did not move or speak. Knowing that he was almost certainly doing a foolish thing—how many minutes did they have left, in any case?—Paul got up, turned, and walked deliberately back to the campfire. He did not look back. He heard no sounds behind him: if the boy was there, he was moving silently across the gray, dead ground.
Florimel and Nandi were nearest; they looked up at him with a question in their eyes. Paul stopped beside them, then carefully sat down, eyes still averted.
"Anybody touch me," the boy promised, "I cut them."
"Then you just sit there," said Florimel.
Paul cleared his throat. "Sellars is talking to him."
"What?"
"He trying to," the boy said sullenly. "But it locking up my head."
The others around the fire had turned toward them now. "The child is terrified," said Bonnie Mae.
"Just tell us what you think he is trying to say," said Florimel. "That is all we want. Martine, are you listening?"
"I am . . . trying. It is . . . There are . . . distractions."
Paul could tell it was far worse than a distraction. Martine Desroubins had the look of someone suffering a five-alarm migraine.
"He talking again," Cho-Cho said suddenly. The others leaned toward him. "He say . . . he say. . . ." The boy sighed and his eyes squeezed shut. For a long, tense moment he was silent, his jaw working. "This . . . is very difficult," he said at last. "I apologize . . . for the confusion." But though it still was Cho-Cho's voice, a child's voice, the intonation had changed.
"Sellars?" asked Florimel. "Is that you?"
"Yes." Cho-Cho's eyes remained closed even as his mouth moved, as though the child were talking in his sleep. As though he were possessed, Paul thought. "In fact," Sellars continued, "I have many apologies to make, but we don't have the time. It is not easy to manipulate the child's neurocannular connection to speak directly to you, but what I have to say is too important and too complicated to be relayed through little Cho-Cho."
"What's going on?" Florimel's voice held anger as well as relief. "Where have you been all this time? While everything in this damned artificial universe was trying to kill us?"
"No time to explain, I'm afraid. I am deep into the workings of the network and the operating system and my head feels like it's going to explode—and that's the least of our problems." Paul could hear the incredible strain even through the child's supple voice.
"You know about Jongleur escaping, then?" he asked.
"What?" The boy's face remained impassive but the voice was clearly startled. "Jongleur?"
Paul told him, with help from the others.
"He was planning it all along," said Sam Fredericks miserably.
"It's not your fault, Frederico," Orlando told her. "But if we get another chance, let's cut his head off, okay?"
"Oh, my," said Sellars. "Is that . . . do I hear . . . Orlando Gardiner?"
Orlando grinned sourly. "Pretty scanny, huh?"
"Explanations must wait until later—if there is such a thing as later," Sellars told him. "The operating system is failing, preparing for its own destruction. I need to make direct contact with it now. That is our only hope to preserve the system long enough to get you out, and it's a very thin hope. Quick, now. I saw some trace of a contact, just minutes ago, between your group and the innermost workings of the system."
"Yes, Renie Sulaweyo is there, in the center of it. That is who we were speaking to with the access device," Florimel said heavily. "But Jongleur has taken it."
Paul waited for Sellars to say something, anything, but the voice that spoke through Cho-Cho's virtual body had gone silent. "So is that it?" Paul asked at last. "We were ready to give up before we heard your voice. Is that all you've got to give us?"
"I am thinking, damn it," Sellars snapped. "But I confess I am at a loss. I have tried everything possible on my end, but the conscious part of the operating system has isolated itself and won't respond to me."
Paul turned to Martine Desroubins, who seemed to be listening with only half her attention. "Martine, you told me how you found your way out of that other strange world—how you and !Xabbu managed to open a gateway. Could you do it again?"
"Open . . . a gateway. . . ?" The pain in her voice was palpable. She and Sellars both sounded like they were trying to carry on business while being stung to death by bees. "Renie . . . !Xabbu . . . they are . . . beyond any gateway, I think."
"But you had the communicator in your hand." Paul leaned closer, trying to keep her focused. "Can't you . . . feel it? You said when we came back from the mountain to Kunohara's world that you fell a connection, sensed it with your mind somehow—that you held on so we could follow it back. Come on, Martine, you can do things none of the rest of us can do! We have no other chance!"
"Do it," T4b said. He put out a hand and touched the blind woman's fingers. She flinched a little, startled. "Be strong. Don't want to get sixed, us—not yet!"
"But that connection to Kunohara's world was alive," Martine said weakly. "I caught it just before it faded!"
"Try," Paul urged her. "We need you. No one else can do it."
"He's right," Florimel said, but gently. "It is in your hands."
"It is not fair." Martine shook her head violently. "Already, the pain . . . I cannot . . . bear it."
Paul crawled to her side and put his arms around her. "You can," he said. "You have already done miracles. For God's sake, Martine, what's one more?"
She put her hands in front of her face. "When I did not care," she whispered hoarsely, "I did not hurt so much." She shook her head as Paul started to speak. "No. Do not bother to say it. I must have silence."
Renie stared at the lighter in baffled fury. The orange moon hung low in the sky, a mocking face. "No! I heard her—you heard her, too! She was right there!"
"I did hear her," !Xabbu said. "But I heard Jongleur's voice as well."
"What happened?" Renie could not reconcile the extremes—the joy of hearing Martine speak, the moment of exhilarating contact with their friends, then the ugly surprise of hearing Felix Jongleur's voice bark out something about a priority override. And now. . . .
"Nothing," she said, running through the sequences again. "It's dead."
!Xabbu reached out his hand. Renie passed it to him, then turned her eyes back to the minuscule form of the dying mantis. "I hope you're happy," she snarled down at it. "Our friends are gone now. If I wasn't certain it was Jongleur who did it—if I thought it was you. . . ."
Dying. The everywhere-and-nowhere voice was so faint now as to be almost inaudible. Tried to last . . . until the children . . . could be . . . saved.
"The children?" Renie asked bitterly. "You haven't saved any children. Didn't you hear? Jongleur, the man who built you—he's in charge again now."
No. The devil. Still . . . the devil. The one who hurts and hurts. . . .
"I feel something," !Xabbu said quietly.
"What?"
"I
. . . I am not certain. Distant." He frowned and closed his eyes. "Like a faint spoor. Like the musk of an antelope on the wind, half a day away." His eyes opened wide. "The string game! Someone is asking about the string game!"
"What are you talking about?" Renie began, and then she remembered. "Martine! Isn't that how you and Martine. . . ?"
He closed his eyes again. "I can feel something, but it is so . . . difficult."
No. The wind-murmur of the mantis voice had become a little stronger. No, you must not open us again to . . . to. . . .
"Shut up!" Renie squirmed in anger. "Our friends are trying to call us!"
The mantis struggled up onto its bent-twig legs. The tiny eyes were filmed, dark. You will lead the devil here too soon—steal the last moments. . . .
"I think I am losing it." !Xabbu held the lighter so tightly Renie could see his knuckles bulging, pale against his brown skin. "She is so far away!"
Will not . . . must not . . . No!
"Stop it!" Renie said, then the desert began to melt around them, the dark night colors, the amber moon, even the flaring stars all smearing. "Stop!"
It was too late. The sky and the ground ran together, swirling as though someone had dipped a stick into a paint pot and begun to stir. Renie threw out her hand to seize the tiny insect but it was simultaneously growing and dwindling, dominating everything even as it receded, shrank, became a tiny spot of nothing that sped away before her.
After a long chaotic moment the world came to rest again.
"!Xabbu?" she breathed, swaying with dizziness.
"I am here, Renie." His hand touched hers, clutched, held.
They were still in the desert, !Xabbu's imaginary Kalahari, but now it was somehow also the pit in which Renie had spoken to the false Stephen. The stars, moments ago so bright, were now almost unimaginably distant, faint as the last embers of a fire. Renie and !Xabbu crouched on a rim of earth that had been the outskirt of the dry pan, but the land had stretched up above them into the walls of the pit, and the gulley and its tiny trickle of stream had dropped away far beyond their reach, half a hundred meters below their ledge. Despite the distance and the dying stars, the light had the impossible clarity of a dream. Renie saw that the shape huddled beside the stream didn't resemble a mantis any longer, but neither was it a child. It was something else entirely, something not quite definable-small, dark, and very much alone.
All will die. The breathy voice rose up like smoke. Could not . . . save the children.
A glimmering silver something lay on the rough gray stone floor of the pit, as hopelessly beyond reach as though it were on one of the stars overhead. As she watched it, it suddenly sprouted legs. Like a tiny metallic beetle, it crept away from the child-thing, limping blindly until it toppled over the edge into the river and was gone.
The lighter, Renie realized. The little flicker of hope she had felt in the desert finally went out. We've lost it. We've lost everything.
"This is the sun," !Xabbu murmured beside her. For a moment, she thought he was talking to her, but his eyes were shut, and what he said made no sense. "Yes. And now it moves lower. Fingers so, thumbs wide. There—it sets behind the hills."
She could not keep her eyes closed a moment longer, no matter what the risk. Already the lassitude was creeping over her, a dark fog shot with red light and tiny, bursting stars. Another moment and she would find it easier simply to give up. The gnawing ache—it was in her back, she knew, but it felt as if it went right through her body and out through her chest—was growing more distant. The pain was receding.
Calliope Skouros knew this was not a good sign.
Should have waited until Stan called back, she thought, and coughed up another bubbly spill of blood. Wish he was here. Look, Chan, I could tell him. I wore my flakkie for once. Kept the blade from going all the way through my lung and into my heart. That's why I won't be dead for at least another two or three minutes. Plenty of time.
Yeah. Plenty of time for what?
Calliope tried to roll over from her side onto her stomach. If she could crawl there might, just might, be something she could do—maybe drag herself down the steps and out the front door of the loft. Also, there would be less chance of snagging the knife on something. She knew she couldn't pull it out—the blade and the shock-absorbent gel of the flak jacket were probably the only thing keeping the wound even partially sealed. Without the knife that had almost killed her, she'd die in seconds.
It was no use. Her arms weren't strong enough to roll her onto her stomach, which meant they certainly weren't going to lift her body. All those hours in the gym and all she could do was thrash uselessly, like a fish hauled onto the deck of a boat. She might be able to pull herself a few inches but she would never make it down the stairs. She coughed and a sudden spike of agony went through her. For a long moment afterward she could only grunt and clamp her jaws against the scream that would probably open the wound fatally wide.
Something made a little sighing noise behind her. Calliope strained to lift her head, but could see nothing from her angle on the floor. Johnny Dread must be on the other side of the room—she had heard him walk across the floor and climb into what must be the strange bed in the corner and had not heard him move again. Who had made the noise?
The woman—the woman who lived with him. The one he just killed.
Calliope scrabbled herself a little to one side, pivoting slowly on the axis of her hip and sliding through a puddle of her own blood, until she could see the woman, who was also lying on her side, as though she and Calliope were a pair of very disturbing bookends. The face was deathly pale but the eyes were wide. Staring. Staring at her.
The woman who had been shot made a little mewing noise.
Yeah, me too, sister. Calliope struggled to hang onto coherence, fighting without even knowing why against the encroaching darkness in her vision, the blurriness at the edge of her thoughts. We both wanted him, even though I'm guessing your reasons were different than mine. And we both misjudged him.
The other woman's eyes opened wider. She let out another small sigh.
Like she's trying to tell me something. She's sorry? She didn't know he was home? He made her lure me in? What difference does it make?
Then she saw the corner of the woman's pad sticking out from under her chest, spattered with red as though painted by a child. She had fallen on it and her body had hidden it from Dread. The woman's eyes flicked down toward it, then up to Calliope, mutely pleading.
"I see it," Calliope tried to say, but the words came out only as bloody bubbles. It will kill me to get to it, she thought dimly. Then again, I'll die if I don't.
She tried to stretch out her arms, hoping to catch her nails in the carpet and pull herself forward, but she couldn't lift them beyond her chest without a bolt of pain that made her feel as though someone had kicked the hilt of the knife in her back. As shadows gathered before her eyes and even the fibers of the carpet seemed to slip farther and farther away until they seemed like some strange snow-covered forest seen from the window of a plane, she discovered that if she wiggled her legs she could inch forward on her side.
They never taught us this one. . . . She did her best to ignore the scalding pain that came with each movement. The carpet dragged at her like fingers. All that stuff about climbing walls, shooting at targets. They should have taught us . . . how to crawl . . . like a worm. . . .
The worm coughed. The worm coiled in shock at the agony, writhed, even cried out in a quiet bubbling gasp. When the red electrical-shock fog retreated, the worm cursed silently, bitterly, and tried to crawl forward once more.
Too bad I don't have a brain at each end. Don't worms have that? Or is that dinosaurs? Stan's nephews would know.
Since when do you care about dinosaurs, Skouros? Stan asked her.
They're interesting, she told him. They died out because they were stupid. Too big. Too slow. Didn't wear their flakkies.
But they did—they wore their flakkies, even on
a weekend call on their day off. They just didn't take their partners. That was the real problem. Ask Kendrick—he loves the things.
It's all right. It doesn't matter. They're all dead a long time now, right? I'll just sit on the couch . . . get a little rest.
You tired, Skouros?
Oh, yes, Stan. I'm really tired . . . really, really . . . tired. . . .
The fog cleared a little. She could see something pale before her. The moon? It was surprisingly close. But was it the right time of day?
The ghostly white shape was the woman's face, only centimeters away. God, no. I was out there, right out. Running out of oxygen. . . .
Calliope inched forward until she could touch the pad with her fingers, feel the curved case.
Can't get it open—it's under her. . . .
She shoved weakly at the woman with her head, trying to get her to move, but although her eyes were still open, the stranger did not react. Shit, don't tell me she's dead, please, please. . . . Dead weight. Right on top of it. Calliope shoved her hand forward, watching it with a kind of crazed interest as it closed on the pad. She tugged, lost her grip on the slippery surface. She tried again, fighting the blood which now seemed not just on her hands and the floor and the pad, but all around her in a mist, even filling her ears so that the sound of her own heartbeat became as close and strange as the voice of the sea in a shell.
Slowly, she brought her other hand up. The ray of pain in her back grew brighter, fiercer, threatened to set her insides on fire. Her fingers closed. She pulled. It came free.
Calliope fumbled with the bloody cover until she found the place to touch. The pad sprang open, the screen astonishingly clean and bright.
No blood, she realized. Must be the last place like that on Earth. . . .
She could make no sense of what she saw on it, the open files, the flicker of movement in a view-window—her vision was blurring badly. She could only pray that the thing's audio pickup was switched on. She did her best to speak, coughed, wept, then tried again. Her voice, when it came out, was as quiet as the whisper of a shy child.