by Tad Williams
Back in the Otherland network, Renie, !Xabbu, and the others have come through their jury-rigged gateway, following Dread's trail into a mysterious simworld known only as the House. They quickly discover it's called that because the world is nothing but a house—an endless collection of halls and rooms, with separate civilizations living only floors apart from each other. They are assisted in their queries by a brotherhood of monks who maintain the House's monstrous library, but Martine is kidnapped by Dread, and with the aid of one of the monks they set out in search of her—and the murderer.
Someone else searching for the murderer Dread—although in the real world, not the virtual—is Calliope Skouros, an Australian homicide detective. In the course of investigating one of Dread's earliest killings, she begins to find out just what a strange and unpredictable killer he is. Although Dread—also known by his birth-name, John Wulgaru—is listed as dead in police records, Calliope begins to suspect that he is alive.
Dread is not only alive, but has returned to Sydney, setting up operations only miles from Detective Skouros. He has brought the American programmer Dulcie Anwin to Australia to help him make sense of the Otherland network, whose existence he discovered while eliminating one of Felix Jongleur's Grail Brotherhood rivals. Dulcie finds herself strangely attracted to Dread—she knows he is a criminal, but has no idea of his true proclivities—and Dread is more than willing to use that attraction for his own benefit. He has big plans for the network, and plans to use his experience there as a basis for overthrowing his employer, Jongleur. He sets Dulcie up in a loft and puts her to work.
In South Africa, Renie's father Long Joseph Sulaweyo and friend Jeremiah Dako have been guarding her and !Xabbu while they lie helpless in the V-tanks they have used for long-term access to the network. But Long Joseph, cut off from drink, miserable, and distracted, left the abandoned army base to head for Durban and was kidnapped outside the hospital where his son Stephen lies comatose. The kidnapper turns out to be Renie's ex-boyfriend Del Ray, whose own life has been ruined by the help he gave Renie. He is desperate to find Renie so he can get a group of thugs (whom Dread hired on behalf of Jongleur) off his back. But when Joseph and Del Ray leave the hospital after going back to see Joseph's son, they are trailed by a mysterious black van. Then, when they return to the army base dug deep into one of the Drakensberg mountains, they find the thugs are there ahead of them. Joseph and Del Ray sneak into the base through the air duct Joseph used in his escape. Inside the base, Jeremiah has been contacted by Mr. Sellars, who wants to help them, but things do not look good. All but weaponless themselves, they are now besieged by heavily-armed killers.
Shipwrecked Paul Jonas is bound for Troy, which means he is living out the Odyssey more or less backward. After getting help building a raft—and other sorts of solace—from a hospitable goddess, he puts to sea again. He survives the attack of the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, then finds another survivor floating unconscious in the waves. The stranger turns out to be Azador, a mysterious Gypsy who had traveled earlier with Renie and !Xabbu and the strange girl Emily from the Oz simulation, and from whom Renie accidentally took the access device/lighter. Together, Paul and Azador defeat a dangerous cyclops and land on the island of Lotos, where they fall under the spell of the narcotic flowers. The Angel wakens Paul and helps them escape, but only after a hallucinating Azador has told Paul that he too is being pursued by the Grail Brotherhood, that he has escaped from their immortality machines, but many of his Gypsy kin have not. Free of Lotos, they sail on to Troy.
In the House-world, Renie and her companions have had little luck finding the kidnapped Martine (who is being psychologically tortured by Dread) and have themselves been captured by one of the tribes who make the House's attic their home. To their surprise, they find Hideki Kunohara sharing the robbers' revelries. Kunohara, one of the landlords of the Grail network, whose own giant world of insects they had crossed earlier, seems bemused to see them, but intercedes for them with the robbers. Paul Jonas' Angel appears to them all in a supernatural fashion, frightening away the robbers and alarming even Kunohara, who refuses to help Renie and the others any more than he already has, saying that he cannot risk the displeasure of the powerful Grail Brotherhood.
Renie and her companions at last find Martine, but only after !Xabbu has disappeared while searching for her (his baboon sim a more useful form for exploring the rooftops of the House). But Martine is not alone; Dread has prepared a trap for them. When they open the door, he shoots T4b and Florimel, then battles with Renie across a steep rooftop. Just when it seems he has won, !Xabbu returns, and then Florimel finds one of Dread's discarded guns. As Dread prepares to kill Renie, Florimel shoots him. He dies—but only online, leaving the stolen virtual body behind. For the moment Dread has been pushed out of the Grail network, and Renie and her companions are battered but safe.
Ancient arch-mogul Felix Jongleur has been very busy preparing for the Ceremony—the moment at which the members of the Grail Brotherhood will become immortal within the virtual worlds they have built for themselves. He has not been spending much time in his favorite mythical-Egypt simulation, and does not realize how far out of hand things have become there. His servants Tefy and Mewat—the Egyptian versions of his subordinates Finney and Mudd, who have been chasing Paul Jonas all through the network—are now forced to besiege a temple full of people resisting their cruel reign.
Inside the besieged temple, Orlando Gardiner and Sam Fredericks meet other members of the Circle, including Nandi Paradivash, a specialist who is trying to make sense of the network's dying gateway system. There is something very wrong with the Grail network. Its mysterious operating system, the Other, is acting in a peculiar fashion, and many of the simworlds seem to be falling apart.
Tefy and Mewat attack the temple, first bringing in a trio of rogue Egyptian gods to fight with the temple's two sphinx-guardians, then sending in a horde of tortoise men and flying snakes to finish the job. Orlando fights bravely, but cannot keep Sam from being captured by Tefy and Mewat. The unpleasant pair have recognized the teenagers as real people from outside the network, and are about to take them away to be tortured when Jongleur himself returns in the form of Osiris, chief god of Egypt. In the chaos, Orlando and Fredericks escape through one of the gateways Nandi has opened, out of Egypt and into Troy, where they have been urged to go by another incarnation of Paul Jonas' Angel.
Paul has already made his way to Troy, where—as Odysseus—he fits right in with the Greeks besieging the city. But when he is sent to the tent where the hero Achilles and his friend Patroclus wait, unwilling to fight against the Trojans, he decides something about the two doesn't seem to fit the simulation. After much sparring, he reveals his true name to them. Achilles and Patroclus are in fact Orlando and Sam, who recognize the name "Jonas" from something Sellars had told them. The meeting becomes a happy one, although Paul's spirits sag a little when he learns the two teenagers are in just as much trouble, and are just as lost, as he is.
Renie and the others use the lighter recaptured from Dread to leave the House and go to Troy. Unlike Orlando and Paul, when they enter the simulation they are assigned to the Trojan side in the besieged city, aware that their friends may be outside the gates, but with no way to recognize them. They are quickly sent on a deadly raid against the Greeks.
Paul Jonas has a dream in which the Angel appears to him again and tells him to go outside the camp. He meets Renie and the others, They talk for a long lime, comparing stories, trying to make sense of what they have learned. Paul decides to bring them back to the Greek settlement in the guise of prisoners so they can be reunited with Orlando and Sam, but even as they reach the camp the Trojans launch a frightening attack.
Caught in the middle of a fierce battle, cut off from Orlando and Sam, they can only struggle to stay alive. In the meantime, Sam, in a misguided effort to keep up the morale of Achilles' despairing troop and buy the sick Orlando some time to get better, dresses herself in
the famous armor of Achilles and, masquerading as their chieftain, leads Achilles' soldiers out to fight the Trojans. The masquerade is so successful that the Trojans are driven back toward the walls of Troy. Orlando wakes to find himself alone. When he realizes what has happened, he scavenges armor and weapons and sets out across the plain toward the city, despite his own fast-failing health, desperate to save his friend Sam. He discovers her about to be killed by the Trojan hero Hector, and only barely manages to overcome him, then collapses in front of the walls.
Martine, who has been given a role as one of the Trojan royal family, is desperate to keep her friends alive. Hearing of the fighting in front of the walls, she nearly tricks some Trojan guards into opening the gates, but when they balk, she is forced to order T4b to kill the guard captain. The gates are opened, and to Martine's shame the Greeks come roaring into Troy, burning, raping, and killing. Although she and the others are all reunited, and even though the Trojans being killed are merely programs, she feels she has done a terrible thing.
Meanwhile, the Grail Brotherhood have begun their Ceremony, although Jongleur is irritated by the absence of his employee, Dread. Jongleur and technocrat Robert Wells explain to the concerned Grail members that they will not truly transfer their minds directly to the network. Instead, duplicate versions of themselves, virtual minds which have been made to copy every detail in the original minds, will come to life online—but in order to assure that only one version of each Brotherhood member exists, they must kill off their physical bodies. Because they are not aware that Jongleur, Wells, the financier Jinn Bhao, and American military man Daniel Yacoubian are not actually going through with the Ceremony this time—because they want to see how well the process works, these four will only pretend to awaken their virtual bodies and murder their real physical selves—the other members of the Brotherhood are at last convinced.
But Dread has other plans for the Grail network. He has decided to force his way back online, and with the help of Dulcie Anwin and a copy he has made of the access device/lighter, he tries to enter the system. He is resisted with terrible force by the security systems of the Other, but in the course of their battle—Dread employing his own telekinetic talent, which he calls his "twist"—Dread discovers that the network has mechanisms to inflict something like pain on the Other, mechanisms which the Grail Brotherhood has used to force the intelligent operating system to do their will. Dread uses this pain to bludgeon the Other into retreat. Victorious, Dread can now influence and even direct the entire Grail network.
Renie, Paul, !Xabbu, and the others fight their way across the dying city. When Paul meets Emily, a longtime companion of Renie and the others, he is stunned to recognize her as another version of the Angel. A name suddenly comes back to him—"Avialle"—and he is overwhelmed by returning memories.
Suddenly he can remember being hired by Felix Jongleur to work as a tutor in Jongleur's huge office-tower home in Louisiana. And he also recalls his first meeting with his pupil—Jongleur's daughter, Avialle Jongleur. But he can remember no more.
Despite apparently being followed by someone, they enter an abandoned temple and make their way to an altar at the center of a maze, where the Angel appears to them again and tells them they are too late—that she no longer has the strength to take them to where the Other wishes them to go. Paul offers her anything she needs, but does not expect what happens next. The Angel takes the life-force from Emily, who was only some kind of copy of herself, and then opens a gateway. When they go through, Paul and Renie and the others find themselves on a trail on the side of a bizarre and not-quite-real black mountain. They trek to the top, where they find a bound giant lying in a wide valley. The giant is in terrible pain, but is singing a song about an angel. Martine recognizes the song. It was sung to her by the mysterious child in the Pestalozzi Institute, thirty years before, on the day she lost her sight.
The suffering giant does not harm them, but opens a window through which Paul and Renie and the others can see the virtual Egyptian temple where Jongleur and the rest of the Brotherhood are beginning the Ceremony. Some Brotherhood members are still reluctant, but one of their number, a man named Ricardo Klement, undergoes the process and seems to be born satisfactorily into his new, young, virtual body. The others gleefully perform the Ceremony to kill off their physical bodies and resurrect themselves online, but although their physical selves do die, the virtual bodies remain uninhabited. Jongleur and the rest are spared because they have not undergone the Ceremony, but they are stunned and terrified. Something has gone very wrong.
Orlando, whose own physical body is also dying, can watch no more. He steps through the window and into the temple, where he confronts Jongleur and the other three Grail survivors. Sam and Renie follow to try to save him, and Renie tries to bluff Jongleur with the lighter that Yacoubian recognizes as his own stolen access device, which he has since replaced. Yacoubian, in Egyptian god-form, attacks Orlando.
The Grail system, already under a strain, now seems to begin to fall apart. The temple in Egypt and the top of the black mountain begin to merge. Simultaneously, the giant begins to writhe and bellow in pain—it is being attacked by something. A moment later, in the middle of all this chaos, it becomes clear that the attacker is Dread, who is trying to take control of the system from the Other.
Paul's Angel appears, weeping, as reality breaks down altogether. With the help of T4b, Orlando appears to kill the monstrous Yacoubian, but Orlando himself has used up his strength, and is smashed beneath Yacoubian's giant form when he falls.
The hand of the giant rises and then falls down on top of Renie, !Xabbu, Sam, Orlando, and others. They disappear. Then the reality of the top of the black mountain turns inside out again. Martine, sensitive to the network in ways the others can't quite understand, screams that the children are in pain, dying. Paul is overcome and blacks out.
Afterward, Renie wakes up to discover that she no longer wears the sim she had chosen, but seems to be in her own body again. !Xabbu has also shed his baboon form for his own real shape, as has young, female Sam Fredericks, who no longer appears to be a man. But they are not back in the real world. They are still stuck on the now-empty black mountaintop. The suffering giant has vanished. All their other companions are gone. Only Orlando Gardiner's dead body, still wearing the Achilles sim, remains.
But others are on the mountain, even if their friends are not. Felix Jongleur appears, wearing the body of a middle-aged man, accompanied by Ricardo Klement, who, although he has survived the Ceremony, appears to be brain damaged. After Dread's conquest of the operating system, Jongleur too is trapped in the network. He acknowledges that Renie and her friends have every reason to want to attack him, but suggests that they are better off making common cause. He leads them to the edge of the black mountain and points down.
They are miles high, in the middle of nothing. They cannot see the bottom of the mountain, or any ground at all, because everything below them is hidden in a strange, silver cloud. This is no part of the network he created, Jongleur assures them.
OTHERLAND
Sea of Silver Light
Foreword
He was tossed, fragmented, part of the outward-collapsing whirl of shattered light. His own identity was gone—he was spun into pieces like a universe being born.
"You're killing him!" his angel had cried as she herself flew apart into a million separate ghosts, each one shimmering with its own individual light—a shrieking flock of tiny rainbows. . . .
But as the world collapsed, a piece of his past returned to him. It came first as a single visionary flash—a house surrounded by gardens, the gardens themselves bounded by a wild forest. The sky was patchy with dark clouds, brilliant streaks of sunshine falling between them, the grass and leaves beaded with the recent rain. Light dazzled in the drops of water and fragmented into gleams of many colors so that the trees seemed part of a fairy-garden, a magical wood from a childhood tale. During that fraction of an instant before the memor
y grew wider and deeper he could imagine no more peaceful a haven.
But it was all, of course, far stranger than that.
The elevator was so swift and smooth that at times Paul Jonas could almost forget that he lived inside a great spike, that his journey to the top each morning lifted him close to a thousand feet above the Mississippi Delta. He had never much cared for tall buildings—one of the many ways he felt himself slightly out of step with his own century. Part of the appeal of the Canonbury house had been the old-fashioned scale of it—three stories, a few flights of stairs. It was a place he could actually escape from if there was a fire (or so he flattered himself). When he opened the windows of his flat and looked down into the street he could hear people talking and even see what they had in their shopping baskets. Now, except for the winds of the Gulfs hurricane season whose screaming voices could be heard even through thick fibramic, winds strong enough to make the huge tower rock gently, he might as well be living in some kind of intergalactic spaceship. At least until he reached the part of the building where he did his tutoring each day.
The elevator door glided open, revealing another portal. Paul keyed in his code and pressed his hand against the palm-reader, then waited for long seconds while the reader and other less obvious safeguards did their job. When the security door slid out of the way with a little suck of air, Paul stepped through and pushed open the secondary door, this one on metal hinges and of decidedly old-fashioned design. The smell of Ava's house washed over him, a combination of scents so evocative of another era as to be almost claustrophobic—lavender, silver polish, sheets kept in cedar chests. As he stepped into the foyer he moved in a few strides from the smooth, edgeless efficiency of the present into something that, were it not for the vibrant young woman at the heart of it, could be a museum or even a tomb.