by Tad Williams
"Me? Somehow I don't think a lawsuit is going to do much good."
Sellars' smile was less than hearty. "We are far beyond that stage, I'm afraid. I know you cannot completely understand my Garden, but trust me—time is short. Things are changing quickly. The entire Grail system is extremely unstable, in danger of collapse."
"But that's good, isn't it?"
"No. Not while there are children whose health is still wrapped up with this network. Not while people whom I brought into this war of mine are somehow trapped inside the thing. You've already seen one child die while we all waited helplessly. Do you want to make that same call to the parents of Salome Fredericks?"
"No. Jesus, of course not. But what possible use can you make of me?"
"Because the more I think of it, the more I realize that Olga Pirofsky may be our only hope. I have tried everything I can imagine to penetrate the system. I have tried tapping into my volunteers' own connections from the outside world, but although I can access them, there is still something that prevents me from tracing that link through the security system and into the network."
"So what the hell is Olga Pirofsky going to do? She's just a nice woman who hears voices."
"If she succeeds in her goal, it could be that she can do much. What we need at this point is something she might be able to provide—access to Felix Jongleur's own system."
Ramsey blinked. "Felix Jongleur's. . . ."
"If there is anyone who can bypass the network security, it will be the man who created the thing. If there is anything that can get us onto the Grail network, and thus back in touch with the people I have put in mortal danger, it will be found in Jongleur's system."
"But Olga. . . ? You don't need some nice middle-aged lady, you need some kind of—Christ, I don't know, a tactical unit! Commandos! This is a job for Major Sorensen, not a kiddie-show host."
"No, it is precisely a job for someone like Olga. Major Sorensen will be very useful to us, I promise you—we will need all his security expertise. But no one is going to swim to Jongleur's island by night, bypass the attentions of his private army, and climb up the outside of his corporate tower like some kind of spy hero. The only way someone will get into the enemy's stronghold is if he . . . or she . . . is invited in."
"Invited? She quit her job, Sellars. She doesn't even work for them anymore. Do you think they're going to say, 'Oh, this is fun, a disgruntled ex-employee who hears voices and is on medical retirement—let's take her up to see the boss!' That's crazy."
"No, Decatur, I don't think that's going to happen. Nor would we want it to. There are people who go in and out of those buildings all the time and no one notices them. Cleaners—hundreds of them, mostly poor women born in other countries.
"Olga Pirofsky is more likely to get into that place pushing a vacuum cleaner than Major Sorensen would driving a tank."
A half hour later, Ramsey's disbelief had not precisely turned to heartfelt agreement, but had at least mellowed into a kind of stunned acceptance. "But I still don't understand why me?"
"Because I cannot do everything, and I fear I will be stretched even farther before the end comes, whatever that end may be. Ms. Pirofsky will need constant supervision, support, encouragement. Sorensen will be able to help with many of the technical problems, and I will help with others; but she is going into the labyrinth, as it were—inside the monster's lair. She will need someone on the other end of the ball of string, if I'm not overdoing it with the mythological allusions. And of all of us, you are the only one she knows and trusts. Who better?"
"You're assuming that she'll contact me again," Ramsey said, unable to keep bitterness out of his voice. "That's a big assumption."
Sellars let out a soft sigh. "Decatur, we can only plan for what we can do, not what we can't."
Ramsey nodded, but he wasn't happy about any of it. Worst of all was the knowledge that even if they succeeded in getting in touch with Olga Pirofsky, instead of giving her sensible advice—like, for instance, get the hell out of town and stay away from J Corporation—he would be trying to persuade her to do something far more dangerous than she had planned to do on her own. All this on behalf of a cause he hadn't even known about a week ago, and which still struck him as a half-step from total unbelievability.
Sellars cleared his throat. "If you don't mind, Decatur, I find that I am indeed tired now. You don't need to leave, but you'll forgive me if I take a rest."
"Of course, go ahead." He jumped as Sellars relinquished control of the wallscreen and the Garden disappeared, replaced by some kind of car race through what appeared to be a mined course. Ramsey muted the sudden grind of sound. A slow-motion replay of an armored vehicle spinning into the air on the back of a bright explosive flash made him think of Sellars' horrific burns.
"Hang on." He turned back to Sellars. The old man had closed his eyes, and for a moment a wave of pity washed through Ramsey. He should leave the poor crippled bastard alone. If even half of what he said was true, the old pilot deserved all the rest he could get. . . .
But Catur Ramsey had spent his early years working in a prosecutor's office, and the training had never entirely left him.
"Hang on. One more thing before you fall asleep."
The yellow eyes flicked open, alert and solemn as the stare of an owl. "Yes?"
"You said that you were going to tell me the real story of how you found out about the Grail Network."
"Decatur, I am very tired. . . ."
"I know. And I'm sorry. But if Olga calls back, I'm going to have to decide what to tell her. I don't like loose ends. Confessional, remember."
Sellars took a raspy breath. "I half-hoped you had forgotten." He levered himself awkwardly into an upright position, each almost-hidden twinge of pain a rebuke to his interrogator. Ramsey did his best to harden his heart. "Very well," Sellars said when he was resettled. "I will give you this last piece of the story. And when I've finished telling you what I've done, I hope you will remember that confession is not complete without the possibility of absolution. I feel in need of it after all this time."
And so, in a room lit only by the flicker of the wallscreen, by silent images of destruction and triumph from somewhere in the wide, wide world, Sellars began to talk. And as he listened to the old man's quiet words, Catur Ramsey's confusion and surprise gradually became something else entirely.
CHAPTER I6
Badlands
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Gills a Deal-Breaker
(visual: Orchid and attorney)
VO: Homeground Netproduct has dropped actor Monty Orchid from its upcoming series Bite My Beethoven because of Orchid's recent cosmetic surgery. Orchid, best known for his work as the doctor's estranged son on the Concrete Sun series, was to have played a student at a music academy who doubles as a government mercenary, but Homeground says that Orchid's new cosmetic gills are a violation of his contract. Orchid is suing.
(visual: Orchid at press conference)
ORCHID: "They could have worked with me . . . we could have made him some kind of underwater mutant guy—you know, music student by day, sabotage frogman by night. But they just didn't have any imagination."
The bleached, icy expanses of what had once been Arabia Desert stretched on and on, drift upon drift of white like spilled sugar, the misty sky almost the same color as the empty countryside. By the end of the second day, the miserable cold was no longer Paul's greatest concern. He was beginning to miss color the way a starving man misses food.
"But for me," Florimel said, "it is the waste of time I most regret. It is like being forced to walk down train tracks for hundreds of kilometers while trains pass on the other tracks. An entire system set up for instant travel, but we cannot make it work."
They had searched several more snowbound Arabian palaces in hopes of finding another gateway, with no luck. "If we could only see enough of this place to make some sense of it," Paul complained, as he had already done many times, "we could probably find the sort of place
they usually hide their gates."
"Oh, chizz," said T4b. "So oughta just keep digging in the snow like some kind of dogs, us? Chance not."
"We have already agreed." Martine's plume of breath was the only sign she had spoken. Like the others, she was so wrapped in rugs pilfered from the icy fantasy castles that her face was all but hidden. Paul thought they all looked like piles of washing waiting to go in the machine. "We continue to the end of the river. At least we know we will find one there."
"I didn't mean to open up the argument again." Paul stared disconsolately at the line of the black river stretching ahead. "Just . . . thinking about Renie and the others . . . feeling so useless. . . ."
"We are all feeling the same way," Martine assured him. "Some of us may even feel worse than that."
It came up so slowly, perhaps because of the thickening mist, perhaps because the dark, cold water muted its normal vibrance, that Paul and the others were on top of it before they noticed.
"Op it," said T4b. "In the water around the boat—that blue light!"
"My God," Martine gasped. "We dare not go through on the river. Head for land!"
They applied their makeshift paddles, beautifully carved bits of paneling stolen from cabinets and chests in the empty palaces, to fight against the sluggish current. When the bow of the small boat grounded in the shallows they waded to shore through freezing water, losing several precious blankets in the process.
"I don't want to pressure you, Martine," Paul said, his wet feet already making him shiver, "but we're going to be frostbitten if this takes too long."
She nodded distractedly. "We are right at the edge of the simulation. I am trying to find the gate information." The river and its banks nearly vanished in the mists only a few hundred yards ahead, but some trick of the simworld's programming gave glimpses of greater distances, made it seem that there was more river and more land beyond. Paul wondered what would have been seen here before Dread covered the place with killing frost—an illusion of unending desert?
"I think I have it," Martine finally announced. "Pull the boat along beside us so we don't lose it. We must all walk forward."
They followed her small, shrouded figure through the drifts like a group of lost mountaineers trying to slay close to their Sherpa guide. T4b was the slowest, making his way along the river shore with the boat's rope, pulling the little craft against the current. He had been quiet much of the trip, even his usual litany of complaints muted, so much so that Paul wondered if the young man were going through some kind of personality change.
Paul could not help remembering a young soldier in his squadron, a lad from Cheshire with a thin, girlish face and a habit of talking about his family back home as though everyone in the trenches knew them and wanted to hear what they said and thought. The first bad bombardment had silenced him quite thoroughly. After seeing the reality of what the Germans wanted to do to them all, he became as miserly of speech as the most confirmed misanthrope in the trenches.
Six weeks later he had been killed by an artillery shell at Savy Wood. Paul could not remember him having spoken for days beforehand.
Startled, he pulled up. Martine had stopped in front of him and was studying the swirling mists with her blind eyes as though reading directions on a street sign.
What are you going on about? Savy bloody Wood? That isn't real—or your memories aren't, anyway. It was all make-believe.
But it felt real. The details of the World War One simulation he retained felt no different than the recovered memories of his real life, either the musty routine of his job at the Tate or his strange year in Jongleur's tower fortress.
So how do you know any of those memories are real? It was a question he didn't want to face, especially not here, in icy mists that might have cloaked the edge of the world, the reefs of Limbo. How do you know? How do you know Paul Jonas is even your real name—that anything you think happened actually happened?
"Step forward." Martine's croaking voice sent the phantoms flying. "We must hold hands as we step through, just to be sure."
"Did you find Egypt?" Paul reached out and took Florimel's callused fingers, even as she clutched T4b's free hand.
"Just s–step forward with m–m–me—I will explain when we p–pass through. Hurry! I f–feel like I am fr–freezing to death!"
As they walked forward, tangles of unsteady blue light curled up between their feet; sparks vibrated in the air like drunken fireflies. Paul felt the static lifting his hair.
Every detail, he marveled. They thought of every detail. . . .
Twenty paces later he stepped through into burning air and sunshine that struck him like a hammerblow.
The river still flowed, but hundreds of meters below them now, glinting in harsh sunlight at the bottom of a raw, red mud canyon. The dirt road on which they stood was less than a dozen meters wide. It felt something like being on the trail up the side of the black glass mountain once more.
"It is . . . the index said this is. . . ." Martine sounded a little dazed. "Dodge City. Is that not a place in the old American West?"
Paul's whistle of surprise was interrupted by a loud yelp of alarm from T4b. They turned to see the young man stumbling back from what had been their boat, but was now a large wagon on spoked wheels. Odd as the transformation was, it was not so much the wagon that seemed to have startled him as the beast yoked to the wagon.
"W–w–was holdin' the rope on the boat, like," T4b stuttered as he halted beside Paul. "We come through, holdin' that instead!"
The shaggy black creature in the traces had something of the shape of a horse, but its back legs were too large and its front legs had knuckled hands like those of a great ape. Its face was long, but not as long as a horse's, and tiny ears lay close to the sides of its bulging forehead.
"What is it?" Paul asked. The creature had bent to graze on dry grass beside the narrow dirt road. "Something extinct?"
"Nothing I have ever seen," Florimel said. "Not with fingers, no. I think it is something made up."
"None of this is what I expected." Martine swiveled her sightless gaze back over the canyon. On the far side, contorted shapes that Paul had briefly taken for human watchers, but which now he saw were cacti, stood along the ridgeline. "I . . . do not think there were such large mountains in Kansas, even in the nineteenth century."
"Why are we here?" Paul was grateful for the hot sun—he was even beginning to sweat a little. He dumped his rugs, which had changed their pattern but not their general substance, onto the dusty road.
"To imitate the old joke," Martine said, "there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the Egypt sim-world still exists, or at least it is still on the index. The bad is that we could not get to it from the Arabian Nights world."
"Can we reach it from this one?"
"Not if we go all the way through," she said. "The river gate at the end of this simulation opens to something called 'Shadowland'—or once did, anyway. But there appeared to be a secondary gate, the kind that would be somewhere in the middle of the simulation, that we can use."
"And that will take us to Egypt?"
"Yes, as far as I could tell. It is hard to be certain because some of the codes that indicated status were indecipherable to me. But I believe the chances are good."
"Hey!" T4b shouted. "Op this!" He had wandered a sort distance back up the sloping road and was peering at something in the dry grasses. "Hole in the ground, but with like a frame around it. Some kind of treasure dungeon, something."
"Stay with us, Javier," Florimel called to him. "That sounds like a mine shaft. It will not be safe."
"So what now?" Paul asked. "Where do you think this other gateway is?"
Martine shrugged. "If this simworld is named Dodge City, I would think that the city would be a good place to start looking." She pointed down the canyon. "If we are at one edge of the simulation, then it must be in that direction. Do you see anything?"
"Not from here." He turned to Florim
el. "Do you know anything about horses? If that's what that thing is supposed to be?"
She favored him with a grim smile. "I have dealt with a few. Again, the benefits of growing up on a rural commune. Why don't you throw the rugs into the back so we have something to sit on?" She turned and shouted down the road to T4b, where the top of his black-haired head showed above the long weeds. His arm went up and down, as though he were waving at something. "Damn you, Javier, if you fall down in there and break your legs, I am not going to pull you out. Come and help us."
"Deep, utter," T4b said as he rejoined them few moments later. "Took that rock like about a minute to hit the bottom."
"Jesus," Paul said in weary annoyance, "can we just get going?"
They piled into the wagon. Florimel had indeed managed to gentle the horselike creature, although Paul thought it looked at the rest of them with something less than trust as she climbed up onto the bench and took the reins. When the rest of the company was seated on the hard boards she clicked her tongue softly and the creature began to move down the gentle incline. The road was narrow and the canyon opened starkly to their left, a fall that would last several seconds should any of them be unlucky enough to try it, and Paul was glad of the beast's deliberate pace.
"It is so strange," Florimel said. "It is a river valley, but it seems so . . . raw." Indeed, the edges of the canyon wall, banded in red and brown and orange, glistened like meat. "So new."
"I've never been here," Paul said, "I mean, in the real world, but I agree with Martine—I don't think there are many mountain ranges in Kansas. T4b? Do you know anything about it?"
The youth was staring out of the back of the wagon. "About what?"
"Kansas."
"That a city, something, right?"
Paul sighed.
"It is new," Martine said. "At least, I can feel something in the geological information—I cannot think of a better way to say it—that suggests it has changed much and is still changing." She frowned. "What is that clanking?"