by Tad Williams
One of the stingers finally ripped through the fabric of the dome and the pressing weight began to widen the tear. Even Kunohara stared in shock as one of the deformed creatures slid into the hole in the fast-collapsing membrane. It hung above them for a moment, kicking its huge black legs like a horse dangling from a chandelier.
"Downstairs," Kunohara shouted. He snatched at Paul's arm and shoved him toward the steps leading to the lower chamber. The others tumbled after them as the first wasp finally fell through and landed on the floor of the upper room. It stood, eyes staring blankly from its caricature human face, then several of its fellows rattled down on top of it, knocking Kunohara's furnishings into splinters as they struggled mindlessly to disentangle themselves.
When all the humans had reached the room below, Kunohara flicked his fingers at the door atop the stairwell to close it behind them; when it did not respond, he snatched at it and began pulling it down. T4b and Florimel leaped up to help him, but a flailing leg pushed through before they could close it. With a shout he barely recognized as coming from his own mouth, Paul snatched the first thing he could find, a small table, and hammered on the leg until it snapped. Gray liquid spurted through the trapdoor, but Kunohara and the others were able to ram it shut and latch it.
Overwhelmed, Paul stared at the severed leg lying on the transparent floor, still twitching slightly. Beneath his feet, perhaps stirred by what was happening on the surface, the spidery postlarval shrimp swarmed toward the transparent bottom of the bubble, stalk-eyes swiveling, legs stroking. The rumbling hum from the upper room grew louder. The trapdoor began to bulge inward beneath the weight of the creatures swarming in through the torn roof.
"Sixed, us," T4b panted. "Take some of them crawlies with us, though."
"No." Kunohara pointed to a place on the floor. "Stand there."
Martine was holding her hands to her ears, overwhelmed by the buzzing. "What are you going to do?"
"The only thing left to do," Kunohara said, raising his voice as the din overhead grew even louder. "Their field of defense now surrounds this place, too—I cannot even transport myself! But with you gone, perhaps I can still salvage something." He took Martine's arm and directed her roughly toward the spot he had indicated.
"What, he give us to the bugs?" T4b shouted. "Chance not. . . !"
Kunohara hissed with fury and desperation. "Have you not already brought enough ruin on me? Must you insult me, too? Get on that damned spot!"
Paul seized T4b and shoved him to the place where Martine and Florimel already stood. The floor abruptly bulged downward into a round concavity. T4b slipped and dragged Martine and Florimel to the bottom as well. "Gonna drown us, him!" T4b shrieked.
Paul looked back at Kunohara, whose returned glance explained nothing, then abandoned himself to trust and slid down into the growing blister. As the bubble-material bulged outward, the water of the river abruptly surrounded them, the congregation of translucent shrimp now only inches away.
Paul shouted back at Kunohara, "What about you?"
"There is another thing I must do, otherwise they will simply catch you floating here. Brace yourselves." He turned his back on Paul and began another series of elaborate gestures. As if in response, thunder boomed outside, momentarily outstripping the angry murmuring of the wasps. Lightning flared, a murky flash seen through the water that now almost totally surrounded them. The bulge had become a small bubble, connected only by a shrinking hole to the rest of the house. Paul was crushed between Florimel and T4b, scarcely able to move. Kunohara dropped his hands like a conductor at the finish of a symphony and the hole through which Paul was watching him abruptly narrowed, then disappeared. With a sudden bounce that made Paul's stomach drop toward his feet the bubble popped free of the house that had birthed it and rose swiftly toward the river's surface.
The pressure was so strong that the sphere actually shot entirely out of the water before falling back, throwing Paul and his companions into each other, elbows and heads and knees all making painful contact. The momentary sense of freedom was short-lived. They had surfaced only a small distance from the house and its swarming blanket of insects. Rain was pounding down on all sides now, huge drops that smashed the surface of the river into a froth and bounced their tiny, spherical life raft like a child's ball.
Paul untangled himself from his companions and pressed his face against the bubble wall. Even the hammering rain had not slowed the Twins' assault: the bridge to the land was now complete, a hundred thousand wasps and beetles twined together across the agitated water. In a lightning-illuminated moment he saw the cricket and the caterpillar making their way unhurriedly down the stone outcrop and onto the landward end of the insectile chain, like conquerors mounting a castle's drawbridge. Paul couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw Wells spurring his beetle behind them.
"They have seen us!" Florimel shouted, and for a moment Paul had no idea what she meant—the Twins and Wells were surely too far away to attach any significance to their bubble, surrounded as it was by others kicked up naturally in the rain-pummeled water. Then he saw that some of the mutated wasps were swimming toward them, floundering across the water with purpose in their movements if not on their blank faces. Several had already been swept away by the roiling waters, but dozens more were still paddling on with the awkward determination of dogs.
Their spherical ark was splashed by another massive raindrop and slipped sideways, bobbing and spinning. Paul had to brace himself against its curvature to keep his balance. When he could see out again, another glare of lightning showed him the Twins, now poised atop the shattered parabola of Kunohara's bubble. The mantle of wasps squirmed wildly, perhaps struggling to make an entrance for their commanders. A river-tossed stick almost half the size of the house bumped past, caught in the current, and scraped away a few of the hundreds of wasps clinging to the house. Leaves and bits of wood and grass were scattered across the surface of the river. Paul looked up to the cataract behind the house and saw that a great clot of debris had formed, an accidental dam of twigs and leafmold, trembling with the force of the water rushing over it and through its interstices.
The rains, he thought distractedly, so much rain. There must be a lot of water and other things trapped behind that rubbish.
What had Kunohara said? "There is another thing I must do. . . ."
"Oh my God!" Paul shouted. "Hold on—brace yourselves!"
"We are already fighting just to keep upright. . . ." Florimel began, but Paul put his foot against her hip and pushed her back against the curve of the bubble. "Just brace yourself. It's going to be. . . ."
As the lightning flashed again, he saw the great wedge of debris lurch and change shape across the top of the cataract. For a moment the waterfall was almost completely choked off—a change so great that even the misshapen pair on top of Kunohara's house turned to look behind them. As the effect of this throttling of the flow reached Paul and the others the current grew momentarily mud and their bubble settled deeper in the water. Then the clot broke apart and the river surged over the fall like a fist made of green water and white foam, smashing down on Kunohara's house and the insects, driving the whole mass beneath the surface in an explosion of spray.
The wall of water rushed across the surface of the pool toward Paul and his companions, caught them up, then hurled them screaming out over the lower cataract, so that for a moment they were freefalling through the air above the dark, rain-whipped river like a star that had plummeted from the heavens.
The destruction of Rome was in full swing now, and the smoke of the burning could be seen as far away as the vineyards of Campania—a defeat of staggeringly unprecedented proportions. But the Romans, citizens and slaves, could have been forgiven for being caught unprepared, since the massive assault had arrived out of nowhere, and almost three hundred years late.
Before this day had dawned, Tigellinus had reigned two years as emperor. The onetime horse trader was still popular, not so much because of his ow
n acts, although he had been a careful steward, but because of the hatred in which the people of Rome had come to hold his predecessor Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, in the days before his assassination. It was not just Tigellinus, many Romans suggested—even one of his horses would have been an improvement over Nero.
In fact, as of the day before, all had seemed more than well in the Mother of all Cities. A March tramontane wind had swept the skies clean, and spring had seemed to sprout almost immediately in its wake, luring buds out of the branches of the chestnut trees, turning the hills green. Strangely, even the College of Augurs had offered no warning of anything amiss—the most recent sacrifices had gone smoothly, and all the signs had suggested a happy year for the emperor and his people. The empire itself was quite secure. There were still skirmishes at the outer fringes of the Roman world, but generally the idea of war had become little more than the setting for stories told by old soldiers in the wineshops who had fought in Britain or the forests of Gaul. No one had expected any sort of attack. let alone one by a long-dead enemy—especially when that enemy's city had been dust almost as long as he had.
On that late March morning, Hannibal's army had simply appeared as if sprung from a god's hand. Hundreds of years earlier, the Carthaginian's crossing of the Alps had caught the Romans by surprise. This time, Hannibal Barca and his armies had found some even more startling way of traveling. The first anyone knew of his presence was black smoke trailing in the sky just north of the city and the first terrified refugees fleeing down the main roads into Rome itself. Within a few hours fires were burning in many places inside the city walls and the corpses of citizens were being defiled on the Field of Mars.
The city was largely undefended. The Senate had fled south down the Via Appia at the first reports of invasion, some of the senators making themselves notable by crushing other refugees beneath the wheels of their carts in their hurry to escape. The most respected men of the day were far from Rome, in large part because Tigellinus had preferred it that way, all Rome's defenders and generals scattered. And, of course, Hannibal's old enemies Scipio and Marcellus were centuries dead.
The Praetorian Guard fought nobly, but against ten thousand shrieking Carthaginians they could do little; Hannibal's armies cut their way down the Via Triumphalis like a knife through hot fat. Emperor Tigellinus was dragged from the Golden House with his arms bound behind him. Hannibal himself climbed down from his black horse and beat the emperor to death with a stick—a mark of respect, of sorts.
The most bizarre thing in what would become a week of horrors too great to comprehend, was not just that the monster Hannibal of Carthage should rise from his ancient grave, but that he should storm Rome with an army of men who looked so much like himself—in fact, some survivors swore that every soldier was absolutely identical. It was at least certain that instead of the diverse band of mercenaries he had used the first time he had come down into Italy in the days of the Republic, Ligurians and Gauls, Spaniards and Greeks, this time there was a strange uniformity to his troops—each and every one small but well-knit, with black skin, long dark hair, and a strange Asian cast to his eyes. Wherever they were from, they burned and pillaged and murdered with a cruelty so savage and arbitrary that even in the early hours of the assault some Romans swore that the very pits of the Earth had opened and belched forth this army of demons. By the end of the first day, scarcely anyone would have argued.
The few who saw him and survived said that Hannibal himself had the same dark skin and oddly hooded eyes as his troops. Other than his gold-shod horse and his banner, went the horrified whispers, Hannibal was only distinguishable from his minions by the silver staff he carried at all times, and by the fact that he alone, of all his implacable army, seemed to find the ghastly events amusing. He laughed as the young men of equestrian families were brought before him to be butchered, laughed just as hard when their sisters and mothers begged for mercy, as though the whole terrible rampage were a kind of performance conducted for his benefit alone.
He is no human, but an evil god, survivors murmured to each other as they huddled in sewers and basements. He may call himself Hannibal, but even the scourge of Cannae was never so cruel.
As the sun set on the first day of his conquest, the evil one came to the heart of the city, the Forum Romanum. and built himself a palace there. Flies in the millions hovered over the place, darkening the red skies like storm clouds. The demon built his house from corpses and near-corpses, piling them high, skewering them face-up on tall wooden stakes to make his walls, so that each dying man's last sight was of another body being rammed down on top of his own.
At the center the arch-monster Hannibal ordered a throne built from skulls of all sizes, skulls which only hours before had held the diverse thoughts of living folk; when it was finished he sat upon it, surrounded by the high walls of his new palace—walls that screamed and bled and begged—and had the prisoners of Rome brought before him, one by one, then in bunches as the evening wore on, and to each he ordered some terrible thing done.
The old Stoic Seneca, who had advised three emperors, and who himself was the first to admit that many considered him the conscience of Rome, stood brave but weeping before the enemy's throne and quoted Euripides in Hannibal's grinning dark face, saying, "My mother was accursed the night she bore me, and I am faint with envy of all the dead."
The demon laughed loud at this, and had the old man's arms and legs carefully taken off so he should not kill himself, then kept him at the foot of his throne like a dog and made him witness to all that happened afterward.
And indeed, in the end, there was not one of the living who did not at last come to envy those who had already been killed. . . .
It was hard work being God, Dread had begun to realize.
He stood in pale sunlight before his throne room in the Forum and sniffed the dawn air, his keen nostrils sifting the scents of smoke and blood and putrefaction for something more subtle, without knowing quite what it was he sought. His soldiers, a thousand mirrors of himself, kneeled in the Via Sacra, waiting silently for orders. He sniffed again, trying to understand what he was missing, what he was pursuing on the breeze on this lovely spring morning, made only a little less so by the odor of a thousand unburied corpses. Perhaps the faint trace of purpose, of a real challenge.
Destruction for its own sake was beginning to pall, he decided as he surveyed the charred rooftops of Rome. Already he had obliterated half a dozen of the Old Man's favorite simulations, not to mention a select few belonging to some of the network's other masters, and he was beginning to find such exercises boring. It had been exciting at first—he had spent several days engineering the rape of Toyland, testing his cruel imagination to such a degree that near the end, as he lay sated in the midst of the wreckage like a lion beside its kill, he had an almost unheard-of moment of self-doubt, wondering if the elaborate tortures he had visited on Mary Quite Contrary and Little Bo Peep and Tom the Piper's Son, his thundering devastation of their fairy-tale land, might be evidence of some latent pedophilia. The idea had disturbed him—Dread found child molesters a particularly pathetic lot—and when he had moved on to his next target, savaging a charming little comic simulation of 1920s London, he had been careful to limit his more personal and arcane pursuits to those clearly of adult age. But now, several simworlds on, after pursuing the flower of Roman womanhood through fields and burning villas in this latest world, until both bravery and weeping surrender no longer intrigued him, and after a program of terror that was starting to become mechanical. Dread was definitely growing bored.
He picked one of the Dread-soldiers at random and gave it a nonfunctional copy of his silver staff.
"You're Hannibal now, mate," he told his simulacrum. "Here's your first job. Release the gladiators and give them all knives and swords and spears." He frowned. It was hard to care anymore, impossible to forget he was just talking to a poor copy of himself. "Oh, and destroy all the food stores. When that's fin
ished, you and the rest of the soldiers withdraw, form a perimeter around the city, and we'll see what the survivors get up to."
He did not wait for an answer—what did it matter?—but flicked himself back into the heart of the system.
The problem was, it was so easy to destroy things here, but hard to keep it interesting. Initially, of course, just the idea of wreaking this kind of havoc within the Old Man's staggeringly expensive simulations had been pleasure enough, almost like giving the ancient bastard a good beating, and the endless power to cause horror on such a scale had its own intriguing allure. Now he was beginning to feel the limitations of the exercise: soon his complete license to roam the worlds of the network and do to them what he wanted would lose all savor. In any case, it was not true destruction: unless he froze them in eternal and somewhat boring devastation, or destroyed the code behind them (a very different and far less viscerally satisfying kind of revenge), the simulations eventually would simply cycle through and start over and all the destruction he had committed would be wiped away as though it had never happened.
Dread floated in midair in the immense but mostly featureless complex he had built for himself, an open-plan structure crafted entirely of smooth white virtual stone. Outside the windows stretched unclouded blue sky and the endless Outback scrubland he had seen on netshows in his childhood but had never visited, the emptiness that filled the center of his native country. It was not enough simply to hold gross power over the network, he was beginning to think. With the whip of pain—or its analog, since there could be nothing like true pain for an artificial intelligence, however lifelike—he had demanded it give him unlimited control, repeatedly scorching the operating system until it abandoned all protections against him. But even though control had been given to him, there were still too many limitations, and it galled him to realize that although he had equaled Jongleur's power over the system, he still could not surpass it. He could not locate an individual user, for one thing—the system was too complex for that, too distributed. If the blind woman Martine had not announced her presence over an open communication channel, he would not have known she was alive, let alone been able to guess where she was. He regretted now that he had been busy with Dulcie at the time: a quick check of the Kunohara simworld revealed that his former companions' whereabouts were again unknown. He should never have left it to anyone else, even Jongleur's own agents. Especially Jongleur's own agents. Dread was developing a greater understanding of the Old Man's frustration with incompetent subordinates.