by Tad Williams
"No, I don't."
Ramsey stepped down beside them, still amazed that he was alive and free and under the open sky again. "Thank you, Captain. You saved our lives."
Parkins threw up his hands in confusion. "Jee-zuss!" He turned to Sorensen. "Just . . . Mike, just take care of that wife and little girl of yours. On second thought, maybe I will ask you to explain this to me one day. What do you think?"
Major Sorensen nodded. "As soon as I figure it out, you'll be the first to hear."
Christabel was shivering despite the warm sun in front of the railway station. As the military van drove away Ramsey took off his windbreaker, shook a cloud of dust from it, and draped it over her shoulders. It was only as he followed the child and her father toward the taxi line that he realized he was shivering as badly as she was.
CHAPTER 3
Restless Natives
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: IEN, Hr. 4 (Eu, NAm)—"BACKSTAB"
(visual: Yohira receiving implant)
VO: Shi Na (Wendy Yohira) is a prisoner in the New Guinea cult headquarters of the evil Doctor Methuselah (Moishe Reiner). Can Stabhak (Carolus Kennedy) save her before she joins the cult in their mass suicide ritual? Casting 28 cult members, 5 tribespeople, 2 Doctor Methuselah "special toadies." Flak to: 1EN.BKSTB.CAST
It was strange how it had come back to him, the new swathe of memory suddenly revealed, as though the roof of an ancient tomb had collapsed and let sunlight stream onto its contents for the first time in centuries. At the same time, the memories seemed new and painfully raw, like growing skin exposed beneath a scab.
Of course, he wasn't going to get much chance to think about it. . . .
Paul leaped away up the slithering leafmold hill even as the first of the wood lice just missed clutching his leg in a ripple of malformed paws. He could barely keep his feet: the skeletal remains of leaves were bigger than he was, slippery to climb as the bones in an elephant's graveyard. A dozen more wood lice emerged along the slope, the whole pack moving in that deceptive, staggering way, Their deformed legs might be different lengths, but that was small handicap on such terrain, and their dozens of tiny grasping hands were a perfect adaptation for chasing a stumbling, two-footed prey.
Paul dragged himself up onto a great curl of root that emerged from the leafmire like the back of a whale breaching the waves. He could see that even if he reached the base of the trunk, still about a hundred paces away, there was no escape on the far side except along another descending slope of the same half-decayed mulch, a slope littered with the bodies of other sleeping wood lice, curled like ribbed Easter eggs. He staggered on anyway.
"Come back," one of the creatures groaned behind him, and some of its companions took up the cry. "Huuuungry! Eat you!"
Despite the recognizable English words, the voices were so completely inhuman that he felt utter despair wash over him like a cold rain. Even if he escaped, something else would get him eventually. He was alone in a hostile world—a hostile universe. Whether he lived another ten minutes or ten days, he would probably never see another human being, would have only rasping, homicidal monstrosities like these for company until the inevitable end.
The whine of his pursuers became a fierce hiss, a change of tone so sudden and complete that Paul stopped in surprise. The wood lice were all rearing up on their hindmost segments, their distorted little hands waving frantically at him. Or at something behind him.
Paul turned. A man stood at the base of the tree, his dull robe almost invisible against the vast expanse of gray bark, so that for the first instant he seemed an apparition, a trick of the light making a face out of a whorl in the tree's rough hide. He was no bigger than Paul, but he seemed oddly careless of the approaching wood lice as he walked down the humped spine of the tree root.
"Huuunngryyy!" they chanted, like terrible children.
As the man drew closer, Paul had a better view of the stranger's compact frame and distinctly Asian features and guessed that this must be the one Renie and the others had described—Kunohara, the insect world's creator.
The black-haired man glanced briefly at Paul, showing neither interest nor irritation, then stopped just where the root curved sharply down into the leafmold, so that he faced the swarm of creatures like Moses preaching from the mount. But if these were Kunohara's people, they did not seem much disposed to obey him.
"Eat you!" they cried, hunching up the slope.
Kunohara shook his head in disgust, then lifted his hand. A great gust of wind abruptly curled down from the sky, then swept along the ground and past the base of the tree—a wind so howlingly fierce that most of the fallen leaves and other detritus were ripped away in an instant. With piping shrieks of frustration or terror, the wood lice, too, were lifted and flung off into nothingness; some managed to cling to larger objects for a few moments, but within a few heartbeats even those were sucked away. Then the gale died.
Paul stood, astonished. Although the closest of the creatures had been only a few paces away from him, and had been hurled sideways like a bullet fired from a gun, he had felt no wind at all.
Of the dozens, one wood louse remained, squirming helplessly on the ground at Kunohara's feet. "They even speak. . . ." the man said quietly, but he almost sounded shocked. Kunohara snaked his fingers into the plates behind the creature's head, pushing deep. Something crunched and the thing lay still.
"You saved me," Paul said. "Those things would have killed me. . . ."
The man peered at him, then lifted the curled corpse of the man-sized wood louse. He turned his back on Paul and lowered his head. Paul had the distinct impression that his savior was about to vanish.
"Wait! You can't just leave!"
The smaller man paused. "I did not bring you here." His English was very precise. "In fact, you are trespassing. I did not need to rescue you, but these . . . monsters offend me. You are free to leave the way you came in."
"But I don't even know how I got here."
"That is nothing to me." He shrugged and hefted the dead bug. "It is bad enough, finding my blameless isopods corrupted like this. I will not also be made a park ranger in my own home."
"What do you mean, corrupted?" Paul was desperate to keep the man from leaving. He sensed that his rescuer was not toying with him—he genuinely intended to leave him alone in the wilderness. The wood lice were gone, but the thought of what other horrors might be lurking was almost enough to make Paul throw himself on the other man to keep him from going, to cling to his legs like a frightened toddler. "You're Kunohara, aren't you? This is your simulation world."
The other did not reply, but the look of heightened caution that flitted across his face was enough to tell Paul he was right.
"Look, can you at least tell me if you know anything about where my friends are? You've met them before—here and in the House world."
Kunohara snorted. It was hard to tell whether it was a noise of amusement or disgust. "So you are one of Atasco's orphans," he said. "I am almost sorry now I saved you. You and your friends have brought ruin on me." He turned his back again, waving his hand dismissively. "Go and find your own road to hell."
"What are you talking about? At least tell me if you've seen them! Are they here somewhere?"
Kunohara turned around, his look of anger shifting to something more subtle, if not more friendly. "I have not seen you before with those other fools—and you have not been in my world before either, I think. So who are you?"
Paul felt himself at another crossroad. This man Kunohara was clearly no friend to Renie and the others, and Paul was reluctant with good reason to tell people his own name. But he could feel Kunohara slipping away from him. In a moment the man would be gone, leaving Paul alone in a place where he was no bigger than an ant.
"No, I haven't been here before," he said. "My name is Paul Jonas."
Both of Kunohara's eyebrows now rose. "So you are the man for whom Jongleur tore the system apart. Why does he want you? You do not look like much!" He threw
his hands apart, a gesture of frustration or resignation. "Come."
"Come . . . where?"
"To my house on the river." For the first time, Kunohara smiled, but it was scarcely more than a brief grimace. "I might as well ask you a few questions before I give you back to the local Crustacea." He nodded his head once and the environment blurred around them so swiftly and unexpectedly that for a moment Paul thought the ground had literally been yanked from beneath his feet. A moment later everything jumped back into place again and Paul gasped at a world gone suddenly pear-shaped.
The sky curved over him like a weirdly gleaming bowl, and the towering trees which had stretched upward like pillars holding the heavens now bent above him like bystanders examining an accident victim. Paul felt a solid floor beneath his feet, and turned slowly to discover an entire room behind him, multileveled, furnished sparsely but attractively with screens and low furniture. Beyond the furnishings, the stairs, and the different levels of flooring, the world seemed to distort again, but instead of trees and sky, the other half of the wide space seemed to cower beneath a curved wall of foaming water.
The effect was so bizarre that it took long seconds before Paul realized that the curvature of sky and trees and water was because the room was. . . .
". . . A big . . . bubble?"
Kunohara shook his head, but only because he was amused. "It is not so big, really—it is you and I who are small. The bubble floats in an eddy between two cataracts of the river." He gestured to the wall of water which seemed to hang above the back of his bubble-house. "There, see the river pour down? It is most pleasant to watch its motion—turbulence is paradoxically soothing, whereas too much regularity can be maddening."
"I don't get it." Paul swiveled to look out what he thought of as the "front" of the house, with its leaning trees and broad if distorted view of the river spreading out below the cataract, then turned back to the curtain of foaming water behind them. He could feel the boil of water pushing steadily at the bubble, although the movement it imparted to the house was surprisingly gentle, like the rolling of a sailboat at anchor. "If this place is just a bubble, and there's water pouring down behind us, why don't we go over the waterfall?"
"Because this is my world." Kunohara was beginning to sound irritated again. "It is easy enough to keep the bubble floating in one place, balanced in the eddy, circling gently to the side of the main current."
Paul thought it would be even easier just to make the house out of something more substantial and stick it down, or use some programmer's magic code to ensure that the bubble would stay rigidly in one place no matter what, but clearly Kunohara found something to like in the sound and feel of the moving water, the delicate way the bubble swayed and spun. Paul was just glad he was not prone to seasickness. He turned from the view and examined the rest of the multileveled room, the floor covered in rugs and soft mats, the tables low to the ground in the ancient Japanese style.
"Are you interested in the natural sciences?" Kunohara asked suddenly.
"Certainly." Paul was anxious to keep his host happy. Polite chitchat beat the hell out of being thrown back to the ravenous pseudo-bugs any day. "I mean, I'm no expert. . . ."
"Go to those stairs. Wave your hand on the topmost step, so, then go down."
Paul paused at the top of the staircase, looking down into a lower level of Kunohara's house, this one seemingly not much different than the other, except that the floor was made from some dark, glassy substance. Paul waved his hand and the lights in the lower room went out, and he suddenly realized that he was looking not at a dark floor, but at the bottom of the bubble, gazing directly down through its transparency into the river.
Without the reflections obscuring his view he could see the rocky bottom of the river-pond beneath him, which to his eyes seemed as craggy and distant as a mountain range seen from a passenger seat on a jet. From time to time vast shapes slid between stones on the riverbottom, creatures which made Paul flinch in atavistic fear, although he knew that they must be very small fish by any normal standards. There were also a few semi transparent animals a little like attenuated, spider-legged lobsters or even more unusual shapes. Paul moved down to the bottommost step and stood there, reluctant to step onto the glassy material even though he could see a low couch and other furnishings below him, indicating that the floor could hold weight. One of the lobster-things floated up and bumped its head against the bubble, black bead eyes swiveling on stalks, whip-thin legs scrabbling across the curving surface, perhaps wondering why it could not reach something it could see.
"Penaeus vannemei, postlarval stage," Kunohara said from behind him. "Baby shrimp. I changed the refraction of the bubble here on the bottom, so what you are seeing is a bit magnified. Really they would be much smaller even than we are in our present size."
"You've got . . . it's very impressive." Paul did not say so, but although the bubble-house was striking, it was also strangely modest for one of the gods of a virtual universe. "A beautiful house."
Paul waved his hand at the topmost step; when the lights came back on, he saw his own reflection stretched along the curve of the wall like a sideshow mirror. Despite the unfamiliar jumpsuit, the man looking back was definitely him, the Paul Jonas he remembered, although with enough of a beard to give him the look of a shipwreck survivor.
But why do I always look like me, he wondered? When everyone else keeps changing? Someone said !Xabbu was even a monkey for a while.
Shaking his head, he mounted the stairs and discovered the dead wood louse Kunohara had brought back floating in the center of the room, suspended in a hexahedron of white light as though fossilized in amber. Paul's host walked around it, staring; when he gestured, the bug revolved in place. A pale scrimshaw of kanji text ran across the surface of the transparent container.
"Is it . . . something you haven't seen before?"
"Worse. It is something that should not be." Kunohara grunted. "Can you drink?"
"Can I?"
"Do you have the receptors? What would you like? You are a guest. Courtesy demands I offer you something, even if you and your friends have ruined my life."
Kunohara had twice accused Paul and his companions of causing him harm, but he wasn't ready yet to pursue the subject. "I can drink. I don't know if I can get drunk, so I suppose it doesn't matter." He had a sudden thought. "You wouldn't happen to have any tea, would you?"
Kunohara's smile this time was only a few degrees short of friendly. "Forty or fifty varieties. Green teas, which are my favorite, but also black—orange pekoe, congou, souchong. I have oolong, too. What do you want?"
"I'd kill for English tea."
Kunohara frowned. "Strictly speaking, there are no 'English' teas, unless they have begun growing it in the high tropical hills of the Cotswolds while I was not looking. But I have Darjeeling and even Earl Grey."
"Darjeeling would be lovely."
Paul had no doubt that Kunohara could have magicked the tea into existence just as he had magicked them into the bubble, but his host was clearly a man of carefully preserved idiosyncrasies—both Kunohara and his environment were a strange combination of the naturalistic and absurd. An old-fashioned fire burned in a brazier in a depression in the floor filled with sand, but although there was no visible way for the smoke to vent from the bubble, the air in the room was smoke-free. As Kunohara hung a pot of water above the low flames and Paul sat down on a mat beside the fire pit to wait, he found himself overwhelmed by yet another absurdist juxtaposition—one moment about to be murdered by mutants, five minutes later waiting for water to boil for tea.
"What are those . . . things?" he asked, gesturing at the hovering wood louse.
"They are perversions," Kunohara said harshly. "A new and terrible interference with my world. Another reason for me to despise your companions."
"Renie and the others had something to do with those monsters?"
"I have found strange anomalies in my world for some time—mutations that made
no sense, and which could not have come from the normal functioning of the simulation—but this is something else. Look at it! An ugly parody of humanity. These have been created deliberately. Someone with power—someone in the Grail Brotherhood, I do not doubt—has decided to punish me."
"Punish you? Mutations?" Paul sat back, shaking his head. He was beginning to realize that even if the tea behaved as it did in the real world, it was not going to be enough to clear his head. He was exhausted. "I don't understand any of this."
Kunohara stared at the wood louse in scowling silence.
Steam chuffed from the kettle, spread in a cheerful cloud, then vanished, as though overwhelmed by the chill coming from Paul's host. Paul accepted the cup which Kunohara conjured out of midair, then watched as he poured boiling water over an infuser. The fumes rising from the steeping tea were the first thing Paul had experienced in longer than he could remember that made him feel like there might be some point to the world. "I'm sorry," he said. "Maybe I'm being dense, but I'm very, very tired. It's been the long day to end all long days." He laughed, and heard a tiny edge of hysteria in his voice. He leaned his head over the cup to breathe in the vapor. "Can you just tell me what terrible thing my friends did to you?"
"Exactly what I expected them to do," Kunohara snapped. "In fact, it is myself I am angry with as much as them. They pitted themselves against a far superior force and lost, and now it is the rest of us who will pay the price."
"Lost?" Paul took his first sip. "Oh, my God, this is wonderful." He blew on the tea and sipped again, trying to make sense of what Kunohara was saying. "But . . . but nobody's lost anything yet, as far as I can tell. Except the Brotherhood. I think most of them are dead now." He stopped, suddenly fearing that in his weariness he had said too much. Was Kunohara one of the Brotherhood, or just someone who rented space from them?