by Tad Williams
His host was shaking his head. "What nonsense is this?"
Paul stared at him. There was, of course, no way to know what someone was really thinking behind his face back in the real world, let alone here. But, he reminded himself, it might have been as little as an hour since he and Renie and the others had experienced . . . whatever it was they had experienced. It was too late in the day, and he himself was too helpless, to offend potential allies.
"You're saying you don't know what happened to us? That we saw the Grail Brotherhood have their ceremony—that we met the Other? This is all news to you?"
Paul had the not-inconsiderable pleasure of watching Kunohara's hard face melt into an expression of astonishment. "You met . . . the operating system? And you are alive?"
"Apparently." It was not, Paul reflected, as sarcastic a remark as it sounded.
Kunohara lifted the teapot. Admirably, his hand did not tremble. "It seems clear you know things I do not."
"From what my friends told me, it was usually the other way around. Perhaps this time you'll be a little more generous with your own information."
Kunohara looked shaken. "I will answer your questions, I promise. Tell me what happened to you."
Hideki Kunohara listened carefully to Paul's story, stopping him often for clarification. Even in a drastically streamlined version it was still a long tale: by the time he was describing the climb up the black mountain, the world outside the bubble had passed from twilight into evening and stars hung in the black heavens above the river. Except for the flicker of the fire, Kunohara had allowed his house to grow dark too; there were moments when Paul forgot he was inside the shining, curved walls and could almost believe himself back on one of the Greek islands with Azador, huddled by a campfire beneath naked sky.
Exhausted now and wanting to finish, Paul did his best to keep to what was important, but with so many mysteries it was hard to know what to leave out. Kunohara seemed particularly interested in the silver lighter, and disappointed to hear it had apparently been lost on the mountaintop. At the mention of Dread and the murderer's boastful announcement of his control over the operating system, his expression became dark and remote.
"But this is all most, most strange," he said when Paul had paused to finish his fourth cup of Darjeeling. "All of it. I had some inkling of what the Brotherhood intended. They approached me about it long ago, and they seemed surprised that although I could have afforded to join their inner circle, I chose not to." He met Paul's look with a grim smile. "I said I would answer your questions, but that does not mean I must explain everything of myself. My reasons for not wanting to pursue the Brotherhood's immortality are my own."
"You don't have to apologize for that," Paul said hastily. "I'd like to think that if it was offered to me, and I knew how many children would have to suffer and even die, that I'd say no, too."
"Yes, the children," Kunohara nodded. "There is the matter of the children, too." For a moment he sat in distracted silence. "But the Other, that is truly astonishing. I had long suspected that some kind of unique artificial intelligence underlay the system, and even that in some ways it had begun to change the environments. As I said, there have been unlikely mutations in my own biosphere almost since the beginning. At first I attributed them to processing errors because of the mounting complexity of the network, but I began to doubt that. Now these latest. . . ." He paused and closed his eyes for a moment. In the silence, Paul felt his own weariness tugging him down like a heavy burden. "You saw them," Kunohara finally said. "Those mutant isopoda were no chance corruption of the programming. They even speak!" He shook his head. "I suspect that this creature who calls himself Dread has truly bent the system to his own will and is beginning to play with his new toy."
The idea of the monstrous personality that Renie had described having such power over the network sent a chill through Paul.
"And your own story is just as strange," Kunohara said abruptly. "You were actually employed by Felix Jongleur?"
"That's what I remember, but beyond that point there's still some kind of block. The rest is all blank, except for the angel—except for Ava."
"Jongleur's daughter." Kunohara frowned. "But how could that be? The man is nearing the end of his second century of life. From what I know, his body has been almost entirely useless for many decades, floating in a tank, kept alive by machines—far longer than the age of the girl you apparently tutored. Why should he want a child?"
Paul sighed. "I hadn't even thought of that. I don't understand any of it. Not yet."
Kunohara slapped his hands on his legs and stood.
"There will be much to consider and discuss tomorrow, but I see that you are falling asleep. Find yourself a place to stretch out. If you need anything you have only to ask the house, but I think you will find the beds are comfortable. I will darken the wall of the place you choose so the morning sun will not wake you too soon."
"Thank you." Paul got laboriously to his feet. "I said it before, but I'll say it again. You saved my life."
Kunohara shrugged. "As you may yet save mine. Information is the most valuable capital in this network. I have always maintained sources of my own, of course, out of necessity. Sharing this network with Jongleur and his associates is like living in the Florence of the Medicis. But I must confess that we have come to a time when my knowledge is failing me."
Paul staggered across the room toward an alcove where a bed that was little more than a padded mat lay unrolled on the floor. "One more question," he said as he slumped onto it. "Why were you so certain we'd lost? That the Brotherhood had won?"
Kunohara paused at the entrance to the alcove. His face was again a stoic mask. "Because things have changed."
"Those new mutants?"
He shook his head. "I did not know of them until I saw your distress. But shortly before that happened, I discovered that I have been affected by the same thing you others have experienced, despite being one of the founders of this virtual universe." His smile seemed almost mocking. "I can no longer leave the network. So I too can die here, it seems." He gave a brief bow. "Sleep well."
Paul woke in the middle of the night, disoriented from yet another dream of being chased across clouds by a giant whose every step made tremors. He sat upright, heart speeding, and discovered he was still bouncing, although it was less than in the terrifying dream-pursuit, but as he saw the quiet, restful shapes of Kunohara's house around him, he relaxed. It was raining outside, the drops huge from his perspective. They thudded down on the bubble walls and stirred up the waters of the eddy, but Kunohara had apparently buffered the force so that Paul felt it as no more than a mild jouncing.
He had just lain down again, trying to make his mind a companionable blank in the hope of finding a more soothing dream this time, when a loud and weirdly familiar voice filled the room.
"Are you there? Can you hear me? Renie?"
He scrambled to his feet. The room was empty—the voice had come from thin air. He took a few steps and banged his shin on a low table.
"Renie, can you hear us? We're in bad shape. . . !"
It was the blind woman, Martine, and she sounded frightened. Paul pawed at his head, confused and frustrated by the voice from nowhere. "Kunohara!" he shouted. "What's going on?"
Light began to glow all around him, a dim, sourceless radiance. His host appeared, dressed in a dark robe. He too seemed disoriented. "Someone . . . someone is using the open communication band," he said. "The fools! What do they think they are doing?"
"What communication band?" Paul demanded, but the other man was making a series of gestures. "Those are my friends! What's going on?"
A group of view-windows sprang open in midair, filled with darting sparks of light that might have been numbers or letters or something even more obscure, but they seemed to make sense to Kunohara, who scowled. "Seven hells! They are here—in my world!"
"What's going on?" Paul watched as Kunohara opened a new and larger window. This one w
as full of dark forms; it was a moment until Paul realized he was looking at a section of the macrojungle by moonlight. Rain was splashing down with a force like artillery shells. Paul could make out several dim shapes huddled beneath an overhanging leaf. "Is that them? How are they talking to us?"
"Please answer us, Renie," Martine's voice moaned. "We're stuck somewhere without. . . ."
The sound abruptly died. Before Paul could open his mouth to ask more questions, another disembodied voice cracked through the room, deeper and stronger than the first. He had heard this one before too, Paul realized with mounting horror, but only once—from the sky above the black glass mountain. . . .
"Martine! Is that you, sweetness?" The big bad wolf discovering that bricks were no longer being issued to pigs could not have sounded more pleased. "I've missed you! Do you have any of my other old mates with you?"
Martine had lapsed into what was doubtless terrified silence, but the gloating voice did not seem to mind.
"I'm a bit busy at the moment, my old darling, but I'll send some friends to find you. Don't move! They'll be with you in a few minutes. Actually, go ahead and move if you want—it won't do you a bit of good." Dread laughed, a clear, wholehearted sound of enjoyment. The figures Paul could see in the open view-window shrank back even farther into the shadows beneath the leaf.
He turned and grabbed Kunohara's arm. "We have to help them!"
In the dim light, Kunohara's profile seemed carved from unmoving stone. "There is nothing we can do. They have brought this on themselves."
"You saved me!"
"You did not reveal yourself to those who would destroy me. In any case, I think it is too late for them anyway, no matter what this Dread chooses to do. They have been found by a nearer enemy."
"What are you talking about?"
Kunohara pointed at the window. The leaf where Martine and the others huddled still bounded beneath the heavy raindrops, but a huge shadow had crossed into Paul's field of view, a towering mass of jointed legs and armor that seemed, eclipse-like, to swallow the projected image.
"It is a whip scorpion," said Kunohara. "At least they will not suffer long."
CHAPTER 4
In Silver Dreaming
NETFEED/NEWS: Free Speech for Talking Toys?
(visual: Maxie Mouth Insult Doll, manufacturer's demo)
VO: Parents of a nine-year-old boy in Switzerland are suing the local school authorities, saying that their child is being punished for insubordinate speech when the real culprit is a talking toy named Maxie Mouth, manufactured by the FunSmart company,
(visual: Funsmart VPPR Dilip Rangel)
RANGEL: "Maxie Mouth is a full-range interactive toy. It talks—that's what it does. Sometimes it says bad things. No matter how unpleasant the remarks may have been, they are not the fault of the owner, who is a minor child. It's one thing to confiscate the toy—we've seen a lot of that—another thing to hold a child responsible for what the toy calls a teacher. Who is apparently a fairly oppressive old bitch, by the way. . . ."
There could be no mountain so tall, it was inconceivable.
"If this were the real world," Renie gasped to !Xabbu in the agonizing middle of what seemed to be their fourth or maybe fifth full day descending the mountain, "then the top would have been above the atmosphere, in outer space. There wouldn't have been any air. The cold would have flash-frozen our bones in our bodies."
"Then I suppose we should be grateful." He did not sound convinced.
"Chance not," Sam muttered. '"Cause if we were poking up into outer space, we'd be dead and we wouldn't have to do this hiking fenfen any more."
This was a rare exchange. The exhaustion and misery of the journey were too great, the danger too constant, to encourage talking. The path still led them in a monotonous clockwise spiral down the massive black cone, but as it receded back into the mountain, or simply melted slowly into nothingness, the trail became too narrow for anything except single file, too treacherous for them to attempt any speed greater than a trudging walk with eyes flicking between the edge of the trail and the back of the person just ahead.
Sam had slipped twice, saved both times because they were now marching so closely together that everyone was within arm's reach of someone else. Jongleur had almost fallen once too, but !Xabbu had shot out a hand and grabbed the man's arm, allowing him to topple backward instead of forward. !Xabbu had acted without thought, automatically, and Jongleur did not thank him. Renie could not help wondering what she would do if the Grail master stumbled again and she were the only one who could save him.
After Jongleur's near-miss, they made it a practice to rotate positions during the dwindlingly frequent wide spots along the path, so that the four of them took turns at the front, ensuring that whoever was leading would be relatively alert. Only Ricardo Klement was left out of the rotation—consigned to the rear, where his somnambulistic stops and starts would threaten no one but himself.
It was an indescribably dreary trip. Other than the occasional odd shapes of the black stone itself, its bulges and candledrip flutings, there was nothing to look at, no plant life, not even the distraction of weather. The sky that so closely and fearfully surrounded them was less interesting than a concrete wall. Even the distant beauty of the silvery-white cloudbank below them, with its unstable shimmering and gleams of rainbow light, quickly lost the power to engage, and in any case it was far too dangerous to look over the edge for more than a few seconds. Weary feet frequently stumbled: the trail, though monotonous, was not uniform.
By the time they had gone through their third miserable night's sleep in one of the mountainside's narrow crevices—"night" signifying only the period during which they stopped walking, because the black peak remained in perpetual twilight—even the violent angers of the first camp had disappeared. Felix Jongleur barely mustered the energy for the few necessary communications, apparently avoiding even contempt as a waste of resources. Renie's fear and dislike of him did not disappear, but in the dull slog of routine and the occasional shock of accident it receded into something at the back of her mind, a small, cold thing that slept. Even Sam, despite her loathing of Jongleur, began to lower her guard a little. She still would not speak to him, but if she stumbled and he was the one in front of her, she would reach out and steady herself on his naked back. The first time she had shivered in disgust, but now, like almost everything else, it had become only another part of their bleak routine.
"I just realized something," Renie said quietly to !Xabbu. Since they had not found a place wide enough to sit, they were taking their rest standing up, backs against the mountain's side. With no sun to warm it or night to chill it, the temperature of the stone was indistinguishable from that of her own skin. "We were supposed to climb this."
"What do you mean?" He lifted one of his feet carefully and massaged the sole.
She sneaked a look at Jongleur, who stood a few meters away down the slope, spine and head pressed back against the smooth rock face. "Paul's angel," she whispered. "Ava. She said something about how we were supposed to get to the mountaintop ourselves, but there wasn't time. And then she made that gateway and dropped us right onto the path. Do you see? They wanted us to climb this whole thing. Imagine that! Having to go uphill even farther than we've already gone down." She shook her head. "The bastards. It probably would have killed half of us."
!Xabbu too was shaking his head, but in puzzlement. "But who wanted that? Who are they?"
"The angel. And the Other, I guess. Who knows?"
He pursed his lips, then wiped a hand across his eyes. Renie thought he looked wrung out—more weary than she had ever seen him. "It is like the journeys our people must make, where we must sometimes travel for months in the bush—but that is for survival."
"So is this, I guess. But it still makes me angry, someone setting up an obstacle course like this. 'Oh, and let's have them climb a hundred-kilometer mountain, too. That'll keep them busy for a while.' Bastards."
"It's
a quest." Sam's voice was flat.
Renie looked at her in surprise. By the girl's slumped position, Renie had judged her too exhausted for conversation. "What do you mean, Sam?"
"A quest, seen? Like in the Middle Country. If you want to get something, you have to go on some utterly long journey and earn bonus points and kill monsters." She sighed. "If I ever get out of here, I'm never going in that fen-hole Middle Country again."
"But why would we be sent on a quest? I mean, we already are on one, in a sense." Renie scowled, willing herself to think when her weary brain wanted only to lie torpid in its skullbath of nutrients. "Sellars brought us in to find out what was going on. But those gameworld quests always have a purpose, an explanation. 'Get this and win the game.' We had no idea what we were looking for—and we still don't,"
Her gaze flicked to Jongleur, as still as a lizard on a rock. Something tugged at her memory. "It was Ava who kept sending Paul places, wasn't it? And she did it for you and Orlando, too, right?"
"That was her in the Freezer, yeah." Sam shifted position. "And in Egypt. So I guess so."
"Oh my God," Renie said. "I've just realized some- thing." Her voice sank to a whisper. "If Paul Jonas was right, then Ava is Jongleur's daughter."
!Xabbu cocked an eyebrow. "But we knew that already."
"I know, but it hadn't really sunk in. That means the answers to most of our questions might be sitting there in that horrible man's head."
"Let's open it up with a sharp rock and find out," Sam suggested.
Jongleur's eyelids slid up and he turned to regard them. Renie wondered if her own sim face would register a guilty flush. "If you have the energy to whisper like schoolchildren," he said, "then you no doubt have the strength to begin walking again." He pushed himself upright and began to limp down the path.
"You seem very disturbed, Renie," !Xabbu said quietly as they stepped out after Jongleur.