by Tad Williams
“Surprise!” most of them shouted. “Happy Birthday!”
Orlando stopped just inside the doorway, dumbfounded. The hall was strung with cloth-of-gold bunting. Candles burned everywhere, and huge trestle tables stood against the walls, covered with food and drink. His mother came up and threw her arms around him, kissed him, and hugged him. When she leaned back she looked at him worriedly, but she was also flushed with excitement. “Is this okay? You said your network can deal with incongruities. This won’t spoil anything, will it?”
“It’s fine, Vivien. I’m just … well, surprised.”
She was wearing elven costume, a long dress in shades of butter yellow and pale beige, and had piled her hair up on top of her head where it was held by diamond pins. “Do I look funny?” she asked. “That nice Arwen girl gave me these hair things. I think that’s her name—I don’t remember her from when I read the books, but it was a long time ago.”
“That nice Arwen girl?” Orlando couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, you look great.”
Conrad came up with a goblet in one hand. “Those dwarves like to drink, don’t they? What do you think? Did we surprise you?”
Orlando could only nod, appalled and touched. The party already seemed in high gear. Someone put a cup of ale in his hands. Elrond came up and bowed to Orlando’s parents. “Regards to you on this festive day, Tharagorn,” the elf said. “You are always an ornament to our house.”
To Orlando’s horror, Vivien actually began to flirt with Elrond, but the master of the house accepted it with good humor. Even more fortunately, Conrad had already wandered off to look more closely at the ceiling joists—he was a hobbyist carpenter—so at least Orlando didn’t have to worry about his father picking a jealous fight with an elven lord.
Arwen Undomiel, Elrond’s daughter—the one his mother had referred to as a “nice girl”—was standing with her love, Aragorn, who was dressed in a tattered cloak and seemed to have come straight in off the road. The man whose name Orlando had more or less borrowed for his incarnation in this world left his betrothed’s side long enough to come and clasp Orlando’s hand. “Good wishes, cousin. We have not met in many a long year. I did not know anyone outside the halfling lands celebrated the day of their birth in this manner.”
“Blame my parents.”
“There is no blame. They are noble folk.” Aragorn embraced him, then returned to Arwen’s side, where her brothers Elladan and Elrohir now also stood, as travel-worn as Aragorn, as though they had all rode fast and far to be here. The elven princess raised her glass toward Orlando in a silent salute. He would have been flattered if he hadn’t known it was all make-believe, just programming.
“I don’t even want to know how you arranged this, Vivien,” he said to his mother.
“Beezle helped.” She pointed to a small, disreputable, and extremely hairy-footed figure on the far side of the room, who was busy out-drinking three dwarves from Dale. “He’s almost human, isn’t he?”
“Who isn’t?” He hugged her again. “Thanks. I really didn’t expect it.”
Vivien was asking Elrond something domestic—he thought he heard her use the phrase “finding kitchen help”—when Orlando’s attention was suddenly drawn to a pale shape moving through the throng at the center of the hall. For a moment he could only stare, wondering which Tolkien character this was, why she looked so familiar.
“Oh my God,” he said. “It’s her!”
He was across the room before Vivien finished asking him where he was going. He caught the woman in white as she stepped into the Hall of Fire. The unsteady light of the flames made her seem a phantom, but if it was not Livia Bard herself who stood before him, it was her exact duplicate.
She looked up at his approach, startled and even a little frightened. “What do you want?”
He realized the look on his face might very well be something that would frighten anyone. After months of searching, to have her simply walk past him … ! “Miss Bard. Livia. I’ve been looking for you.”
She turned to face him and he had a second shock. Beneath the flowing white gown, she was very obviously several months pregnant. “Who are you?” She stared, then blinked. “Can it be? Are you truly him … ?”
And then she disappeared again.
“Beezle!” he bellowed. “That was her! Right here, then she disappeared! Where did she go?”
“Couldn’t tell you, boss. Hang on, let me just roll Snori here off me, or whatever his name is, and I’ll be right with you.”
By the time his parents and his faithful software agent reached him, Orlando was down on his knees on the floor of the Hall of Fire, pounding on the boards in frustration. Conrad and Vivien suggested calling off the feast, but Orlando knew it was for them as much as himself, so he let himself be led back to the party. Still, despite all the diversions and distractions offered by Rivendell in holiday mode, he hardly noticed what was going on around him. As soon as he could decently manage it he made his excuses and headed for bed, pausing on his way up to his rooms to have a word with Beezle.
“Okay, you have my permission—I’ve run out of ideas. Put together your little army of subagents. But do me a favor and don’t make them bugs, huh? I’m going to have to visit Kunohara, and I’ll get enough of the things there to last me for years.”
“Will do, boss.”
Orlando went to bed. Bongo Fluffernutter stayed up late drinking with the dwarves from Dale. He showed them how it was possible to belch several whole stanzas of The Lay of Queen Beruthiel, and also that there was a point at which even dwarves should stop drinking.
Elves don’t complain, but Elrond’s folk had a terrible mess to deal with the next morning.
“Mr. Gardiner, it is always a pleasure to see you, but I hope you will be understanding.” Kunohara gestured for him to sit on one of the chairs that looked out from the balcony across the expanse of forest-high grass and the undergrowth that loomed beyond it like a frozen tsunami wave. He was a small, trim man in a modern-style kimono who appeared to be in early middle-age, or at least his sim always looked that way, his black hair and beard both gray-flecked. “My time is very limited these days. A nephew of mine—barely out of adolescence, or so it seems—is leading a hostile takeover against me. They claim too much of the family company’s money has been spent on what they call ‘the amusements of the chairman.’ Who would be me, and this simulation would be one of the amusements, except they do not know it still exists.” He glowered. “A company built with my patents, and they think to take it away from me. I will crush them, of course, but it is sad for the family and irritating for me. It wastes a great deal of my resources.”
Orlando nodded. “I appreciate you making time for me.” He had never quite warmed to Hideki Kunohara, not having known him as well as some of his other companions had; there were ways in which Kunohara never made himself really available, even when he was sitting right in front of you, chatting in a seemingly amiable, open way. Orlando had always wondered what the man was really thinking, and because of that had never entirely trusted him, but with Sellars gone, Kunohara understood the system’s underlying logic better than anyone alive.
If there is such a thing as logic involved, Orlando thought sourly.
“I’ve reviewed your messages,” Kunohara said, then stopped suddenly to watch a striking black and orange butterfly the size of a small plane flit down into their field of view, almost touch the ground, then lift away again, wings flashing in the sunshine. “A heleconid,” he announced. “Numata, it looks like. Nice to see them so near the station.”
Hideki Kunohara’s house was a recycled building far too large to make a satisfactory dwelling for anything less substantial than a king’s household, or at least it would have been in the real world, where people were limited by various petty annoyances like the laws of physics, but size was not such an issue in a private node where travel could be instantaneous. The house had formerly been a scientific station that Kunohara had leased to governmen
ts and the biology departments of universities because all visitors to Kunohara’s world found themselves smaller than most of the insects and other invertebrate fauna. It was a fascinating if occasionally terrifying perspective: The research station had been destroyed by soldier ants and all the human sims in it killed during the upheavals of the network. Kunohara’s own house had also been ruined. The balcony on which he and Orlando sat now had originally been one of the raised viewing stations which ran the length of the southern face of the complex’s main building; as they talked, Orlando could watch all kinds of monstrous animals feeding and being fed upon in the field sloping away below them, including birds the size of passenger jets tugging worms that seemed long as subway trains out of the damp morning ground.
“Anyway, I’ve read your messages and I don’t really have much to say, Mr. Gardiner. Have you considered the possibility she’s someone from outside the network? A real person who discovered your name somewhere, or even someone who knows you and is playing a trick?”
“That would be worse than the mystery we have,” said Orlando. “Because unless it was one of my friends, and I can’t quite picture any of them thinking this was funny, it would mean that our security is compromised. This network is supposed to be a secret.”
“We have a few people on the outside who actively help us maintain it as a distributed network.”
“Yeah, but even those people don’t know about me.”
Kunohara nodded. “The possibility of this being the work of some outsider does not seem likely, I grant you.”
“I think there must be a shadow-Orlando, although I’ve never seen one or heard even a hint of one before now.”
“That raises questions, too, Mr. Gardiner. It is possible that a duplicate of you might exist, and also possible that it could have escaped our notice for almost three years—it is a big network after all. It is even possible that this duplicate uses your real name, still without attracting our attention. But there still remains one question that would have to be answered before we could accept this hypothesis as a valid theory.”
“I know.” Orlando squinted at a pair of what looked like flies chasing each other across the tops of the tree-tall grass, iridescent objects the size of taxis performing a midair pas de deux with their glassy wings sparking light. He wasn’t nuts about bugs in the first place, let alone bugs that were a lot bigger than he was, but there were moments like this when he could almost understand Kunohara’s world, if not Kunohara himself. “The problem with the shadow-Orlando theory is how Livia Bard knew I had something to do with Orlando Gardiner when she found me in the Wodehouse world—and how she found me again in the Tolkien world. How could she track me like that?”
“The copies derived from Felix Jongleur’s daughter really are remarkable, as you know,” said Kunohara. “Some of the Avialle-shadows seem able to move at will from one simulation to another. Others can travel between simulations, but only in the workaday manner that your Worldwalkers employ, using the gateways. And some of the Avialles do not seem to move out of their home simulations at all, although those versions usually end up holding some powerful or unusual position in their worlds.”
“Yeah, like the one we met in the freezer in the cartoon Kitchen world. I guess the original Avialle—the real person—was utterly important to the old operating system, so maybe all her shadows are still kind of important to the system.” Something tugged at him, an idea that would not quite form. “But why? I mean, we’ve got a whole different operating system now, right?”
“In part, but it’s far more complicated than that.” Kunohara clicked his tongue against his teeth. “As you no doubt remember, all the remnants of the old operating system—that poor tortured creature known as the Other—could not be removed from the network. That is one of the reasons we suspected that some of its attempts to create a kind of life, as it did once already with raw materials from Sellars’s own experimentation, might have permeated the entire network—the ‘simiverse’ as Sellars named it—and changed it into another order of thing entirely. A sort of living, evolving entity.”
“But it didn’t turn out to be that way. That’s what you’re always saying.”
“It’s true, there’s been no evidence of it. We’ve seen no other information creatures like the ones it grew before, which are now gone. Neither has there been any sign of the evolutionary process beginning again in some other manner—not a one. You can trust me on that, Mr. Gardiner—the permutations of life, and now of pseudo-life, are my passion, and I have looked long and hard for any evidence of it on the current network. It is a fantastically complex creation, but essentially it has become what any other network is—an unliving artifact. I’m afraid that with the death of the Other and the escape of all its information-creatures into space, the network is now effectively dead.”
Orlando had more or less known this—after all, the flatness of things, the lack of real change, had been troubling him for months—but being told it in such a categorical manner by Kunohara was a bit like being punched in the stomach. “But the sims themselves reproduce within their simworlds. They have babies. The animals have little animals. Look at your bugs here—they lay eggs, don’t they? Make little giant baby bugs?”
“Yes, but only within the matrix of the simulations. It is part of the program for the sims to appear to reproduce, but it is not true life, any more than it would be if you wrote a story in which someone gave birth. New life in this system is a construct. Look at your Avialle-shadows—some of them have perpetual pregnancies, as is probably the case with the one you are seeking. But that is not a real pregnancy, it is a programmed trait, like the color of a sim’s hair or how fast it can run.”
“But the last time I saw her, she looked really pregnant! None of the Avialle-shadows ever get to the point of showing their pregnancy. I read that in your own notes.”
Kunohara shook his head. “Mr. Gardiner, you are a smart young man and a very fine conservator of the network worlds and I’m sure that wherever he now is, Patrick Sellars is proud that he chose you, but you are not a scientist—not yet, anyway. Do you know for certain that she really did have the belly of a woman several months pregnant, or are you basing this entirely on what you think you saw from a distance of several meters for a period of just a few seconds? The simulated people can be nearly as psychologically complex as real people. Perhaps she feels herself to be with child but her belly does not grow—it never will grow, but she does not know this—so she pads herself with a pillow or some similar object, out of anxiety, perhaps. No, Mr. Gardiner, my friend, when you or I can examine her and see that she truly does have an advancing pregnancy, then we can begin to wonder about how she differs from the other Avialle Jongleur shadows. Until that time, I urge you not to jump to conclusions.”
Orlando didn’t particularly like being lectured. “So you’re saying that this whole weird mess is just another hysterical Avialle-clone who’s stumbled on my name somehow—nothing more, nothing less.”
“I am saying nothing about what it is, Mr. Gardiner, because I do not have enough information.” Kunohara steepled his fingers and slowly shook his head. “I am sharing what I suspect, and also what I strongly doubt. People spent trillions of credits on this network to make things appear as real as possible, but please do not confuse appearance with reality, and especially do not mistake the appearance of reproduction and other symptoms of life, however sophisticated, with real reproduction and actual life. Life is a very stubborn phenomenon that uses an astonishing number of strategies to perpetuate itself. What this network does is mimic those processes for the benefit of its human users, to create a realistic environment—an experience not tremendously different from an amusement park ride. But the gap between the simulated thing and the actual process it imitates is vast indeed. Now, forgive me, but I have kept my lawyers waiting for half an hour.”
Orlando thanked him, but Kunohara was already making his call and only nodded. Orlando left him talking to himsel
f, or so it appeared, as he gazed out across his supersized domain. Flowers tall as redwoods creaked and swayed in the freshening breeze.
Beezle Bug was waiting for Orlando back in his bedroom at Rivendell. Out of the elven public eye and with the rules now relaxed, the agent wasn’t even bothering to masquerade as a hobbit, but was back in his usual form, something that could have been a black dustmop with eyes, a cartoon spider, or even a particularly disturbing Rorschach ink blot. Today Beezle had enhanced these natural good looks with a floppy, horizontally-striped top hat. He grinned toothily and did a little hairy-legged dance as Orlando came in.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“You don’t sound like you are, boss. Any luck with Kunohara?”
“Nothing that cleared anything up. I think he thinks I’m overreacting.”
“Well, I know what will cheer you up. You can meet my crew.”
“Your what? Oh, the subagents. Look, Beezle, I don’t think I’m up to having a bunch of bugs crawl all over me …”
“No bugs—you already told me.” The agent swept off his new hat and a horde of small shapes began to jump out of it. Within seconds they were filling the floor all around him. “I kind of swiped the idea from the Dr. Seuss world. Meet Little Cats A1 through A99, B1 through B99, C1 through C99 …”
“I get the drift.” Already Orlando was ankle deep in a lagoon of tiny, hatted cats. “I don’t need to meet all, what, 2600 of them. I suppose I should count my blessings you didn’t steal your idea out of Hop On Pop.” He squinted at the little cats, which were now clambering up the bedclothes and trampolining across his pillow. “How the hell are these things going to get the kind of information we need discreetly? They’re not exactly inconspicuous, are they?”
“Boss, boss.” If Beezle had a neck, he would have been shaking his head. Instead, he was doing a sort of hairy hula. “They’re my subagents. You don’t think I go out looking for information looking like this, do you? Looking like anything, for that matter? I’m gear—good gear. I just interface with the stuff directly at machine level, and so will they. I just thought the reports would be more fun this way.”