by Tad Williams
After a while, Azador's reflexive grumbling began to die away. He moved like a sleepwalker now, walking stolidly forward, resting when the others rested, not even complaining when they wandered into mud. She heard him murmuring, but could not hear the words themselves.
Even the quality of his attention began to change as the first hour rolled into a second; a stillness came over him, and from time to time he stopped and tilted his head as though listening to something the others could not hear.
But by the time the light began to change, darkening just perceptibly as the middle of the day passed, they still had not found anything.
Look at us! Sam thought. Her feet hurt. She was hot and sticky. She felt a strong urge to lie down and let whatever was going to happen just happen, and had only kept herself moving during the last hour out of loyalty to !Xabbu. Azador's right—this is stupid. Four people stumbling along the river, looking for something when we already know its not here.
They were just making their way out of another whispering crowd of rushes when they saw the bridge.
Sam gasped. "But how. . . ? We've been here before! There wasn't . . . we didn't see. . . . Dzang!"
It was narrow, little more than a wall of piled stones with arch-shaped holes to let the river flow through, but it was wide enough for them all to walk across side by side. Most importantly of all, it stretched all the way to the meadows on the river's far bank—or seemed to, in any case: the other end of the bridge was obscured by low mists.
"You may uncover your eyes," !Xabbu told Azador.
Alone of them all, Azador showed no surprise, as though he had in some way seen the bridge already. Nevertheless, there was a frightened glint to his stare, and after a moment, he turned away. "I . . . I do not want to go there."
"We have no choice," !Xabbu said firmly. "Come. Lead us over."
Azador shook his head, but reluctantly moved toward the near end of the span. He hesitated for a moment before stepping up. !Xabbu followed him, then Sam and Jongleur. Sam marveled at the stony solidity of the thing—she knew they had passed this very spot only a day or so before, but no bridge had stood here.
Azador took a few steps, then stopped. "No," he said, his voice oddly distant. "First we . . . we must say something."
They all waited expectantly.
"Gray goose and gander,"
Azador murmured at last, his voice heavy with some emotion Sam could not decipher,
"Waft your wings together,
And carry the good king's daughter
Over the one-strand river."
After a moment he looked back at them, then stepped out onto the stone path above the glinting, slow-moving waters. Sam was disturbed to see that the man's eyes, hidden for so long, were now wet with tears.
CHAPTER 26
Flies and Spiders
NETFEED/NEWS: Smell—The Final Frontier
(visual: WeeWin's olfactory testing lab)
VO: The Euro-Asian toy company WeeWin has announced what it calls "the first genuine scent delivery system" for net users without neurocannular capabilities. WeeWin says the NozKnoz (pronounced "noseknows") system uses a scent palette of basic olfactory stimuli to create millions of different odors,
(visual: Dougal Craigie, WeeWin VPPR)
CRAIGIE: "Many people don't use neurocannulas—not just because they can't afford them, but also for medical and religious reasons. So we are not just excited, but deeply proud to announce that you no longer need to have your brain wired to enjoy the many smells of the net. This is not one of those cheap chocolate-and-cheese pastiche systems—NozKnoz nasal delivery plugs give results that cannot be distinguished from neurocannular stimulation."
Dulcie snuck another look at her silent employer, certain at some irrational level of her being that even in his deathlike sleep he must be able to sense her guilt, but if he did, his still form gave no indication. She turned back to the small screen on her pad, which she had chosen because it seemed more discreet than the wide wallscreen.
Dread's hidden storage had remained adamantly inaccessible. She had thrown every sort of decryption and security-breaking gear at it, had found it protected by nothing more advanced than a password, no quantum cryptography or anything special, but her gear had run an almost uncountable amount of number and letter combinations past it without success.
For God's sake! It's just a goddamn password! Why can't I break this?
Of course, when it came to passwords, it always helped if you knew something about the person whose account you were trying to crack.
Reluctantly, she gave up on penetrating her employer's mysteries, closed off her access to Dread's system and then ran some cleanup gear. She doubted that either Dread or his security program were sophisticated enough to spot her incursion, but there was no sense taking chances.
Irritated with herself, her earlier bold mood dissolving into worry and second thoughts, she opened up the Jongleur files—her legitimate work, if you could use such a term to describe felonious data theft—and got back down to business. As the signifiers filled her tiny screen she swore, then transferred operations up to the wallscreen—it was hard enough trying to make sense of things in two dimensions, let alone on a screen measured in centimeters. She left it at that, though: for some reason she felt reluctant to submerge herself in a 3D environment, even though she could do some things more efficiently in wraparound.
I'm scared to be helpless in a VR setup while I'm in the same room with Dread, she realized. It's not street hoodlums, not burglars I'm frightened of . . . but him. That's great, Anwin—two weeks into the thing is a bit late to realize it.
She looked at the dark ridgeline of his profile, moving up and down gently now as the bed massaged him, and a sudden image from her childhood reading leaped into her brain. She almost dropped her coffee.
Jesus, I'm Renfield. That guy who ate the flies and spiders. And it's my job to watch over Count Dracula.
She felt a little better after a quick shower, although she had decided on a caffeine moratorium for the rest of the day.
Dracula? Let's not get too morbid, Anwin, she told herself as she sat back down to stare at the Jongleur files. Still, she thought, if her boss popped up out of his humming coffin just now, even full of kind words and barely-veiled sexual interest as he sometimes was, she didn't think she was going to be very receptive.
She did her best to narrow her attention, sifting through the Jongleur information that had not made the first cut, yet which somehow might still hide useful data about the Grail network. An hour passed and she began to feel more like herself, even taking a few minutes to try to reopen Jongleur's weird Ushabti file, but her failure to provide the proper code or password the first time had left it as mute and secretive as an oyster.
They're just the goddamn same, the two of them. No wonder Jongleur hired him. . . . She froze, stunned by her own stupidity in not having thought of it sooner. My God, of course. His employer! If anybody's going to have any information on our boy Dread it's going to be Jongleur!
Within moments she had moved the display of Jongleur files back to the pad and had started to search. A request for "Dread" turned up nothing useful, which didn't entirely surprise her, and neither did "Sydney" or "Cartagena" "Isla de Santuario" or anything else that came to mind. How could you search for information on someone when you had almost no information with which to begin a search?
Jaws clamped so hard in concentration that she would have a headache later, Dulcie pulled up the immense bank of J Corporation accounting records and sent dozens of different bits of specialized gear looking for anomalies while performing the same search on Jongleur's personal files. The guy has to be paid, she thought. No matter what they call it, there has to be a connection. She also pulled up Dread's own system, all of which she had already explored except for the hidden storage—"the locked room," as she had begun to think of it, a phrase out of memory that rang a faint bell she was too busy to heed. It was boring, mundane stuff, but sh
e wasn't looking for a revelation there, not in data she'd already examined. She was looking for a match, however obscure, a place where an open end on the Jongleur side lined up with something similar on Dread's side.
It took almost two hours, but she found it at last. A short string of numbers on a single disbursement out of the J Corporation's staggeringly large operating budget, routed through several smaller companies with no obvious connection to the corporation, one in North Africa, the others in the Caribbean, matched another string of numbers in an account which, although it belonged to an apparently fictitious company, was nevertheless listed on Dread's own system. Based on the dates, she suspected she was looking at some of the expenses for setting up the Colombian assault. It seemed to be an emergency replacement for some funds that had been misrouted, which was the only reason she had found the connection.
It's the little mistakes that kill you every time, she thought gleefully.
With this single small thread in her fingers she began to pick her way backward, following the chain of authority, sometimes by easy steps, sometimes only by leaps of practiced intuition, until at last she found herself moving slowly back up the connection she had discovered between the J Corporation and Jongleur's own personal system. Her palms were sweating, her heart fluttering.
The strands led to a group of files in Jongleur's system labeled "disposal"—which she at first thought was a little joke on the old man's part, but when she began to examine them she found that they were indeed contracts, reports, and other information about the hugely complex waste removal systems of the artificial island, thousands and thousands of nested files, all perfectly, boringly normal. She sat back, stunned and disappointed. How could she have been so wrong? Had she missed a stitch back there somewhere, then followed the wrong thread all the way back across the tapestry? It would take her at least another few hours to go back over it and find her mistake.
She was just about to close the whole mess in disgust when she suddenly wondered why Jongleur should take such an interest in the waste removal infrastructure for the corporate property, to the extent of having it on his own personal system. It was his own principal residence, of course, but it still seemed odd. She checked and found that the same set of files existed in the corporate system, but that didn't prove anything—Jongleur could simply have wanted his own copy, perhaps because there was some more mundane accounting discrepancy he was examining. Still, the Jongleur that Dread had spoken of didn't seem like a man too interested in the day-to-day business of maintaining corporate headquarters.
Dulcie ran a comparison study of the two files, drumming her fingers impatiently until the processing marker stopped flashing.
Two files with the same name, She saw, excitement rising again. And the J Corp. version is smaller than the Jongleur version. Bingo!
A moment's spin of the digital tumblers and the larger file was open. Dulcie's fingers were no longer rapping on the edge of the pad but curling like the claws of a hunting bird ready to swoop. The extra information was secured in a lower layer, like a smuggler's false bottom bolted to the undercarriage of a truck. She keyed it open, holding her breath.
Something whined like a dental drill.
Files and signifiers began to leap onto the screen and dissolve. Message pointers flashed like tiny explosions. Her system defenses were screaming, the high-pitched alarm so painful that for a moment she could not understand what was happening.
Oh, shit—a 'phage! But why isn't my gear stopping it?
She had opened the file without proper permission and had set off a dataphage, one that her own gear apparently did not know how to handle. Within moments it would destroy all the material in the file, not just delete the markers but chew the actual data off the storage. God only knew what else it might do on the way—maybe take her whole system down.
Once, as a teenage babysitter in someone else's house, she had dumped an ashtray into a wastebasket and, without realizing it, set the wastebasket's contents on fire. The flames had climbed the long drapes of a picture window before she wandered back into the room. The feeling of terror and transgression had been just like this. It was all she could do not to leap up and smash the pad against the floor in an attempt to kill the horrible thing she had awakened.
Knowing that every second was critical, she switched the pad over to voice command and began calling up emergency measures, her system's equivalent of the volunteer fire department, since the dataphage's explosive onset had already overwhelmed her built-in regulators. Within a few moments she had managed to isolate the cancerous 'phage from the rest of her own data, but that was doing nothing to stop the destruction of the disposal file she had copied from Jongleur's system. And despite her quick move to firewall the damage, the 'phage seemed to have done odd things to her system already: the communications markers were flashing, as though she herself had been trying to obtain an outgoing line.
Another minute's frantic work enabled her to find another piece of emergency gear she had almost forgotten she had, allowing her at last to grab the isolated section of data and freeze it, but the destruction was huge if not total. She very much doubted there was anything left of the original group of files.
But that's just a copy, she reminded herself. The primary version's still there on the Jongleur system. I'll just call it up and copy it off again, then be more careful with it next time. . . .
It was only then that she understood the significance of the blinking communications marker. With dawning horror, she disconnected, but it was already too late. The implanted dataphage was an extreme measure, constructed not only to destroy the pirated file but to call out and destroy the master file, too, probably after sending a high-alert warning to the owner of the file to give them a chance to countermand.
But if Jongleur's not around, then the whole thing is just gone now. Gone. And if he is around, then I've just told him that someone has one of his most sensitive files.
A quick check confirmed her growing misery. The master file in question was now officially nonexistent.
"Shit," she said aloud. "Shit, shit, shit!"
"What's the problem, sweetness?"
Dulcie shrieked and her pad slid from her knee and thumped on the carpeted floor. Dread was standing beside her, all long, tawny muscles and bare skin, wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist so that he looked like a statue stepped down from its plinth. She had not even heard him approach.
"God, y–you scared me!" But the mere fact of his sudden appearance was not the only reason for her stuttering heart. The pad lay faceup on the floor, full of incriminating data. She dropped to her knees and picked it up, babbling to cover her real terror. "I didn't know . . . I thought you were . . . it's so quiet in here, but I didn't hear you. . . ."
As he stared at her, an amused smile quirking his mouth, she blanked the small screen. "Didn't mean to give you a heart attack," he said. "What's up?" He squinted at her pad. "Why aren't you using the wall?"
"My eyes . . . it gives me . . . makes my head ache, sometimes."
He nodded. "What pissed you off so badly?"
"What?" She was desperately trying to remember what was still open and flowing to the pad. What if he wanted to access his system? "Oh, just . . . some problems with security on some of Jongleur's files. Some of his banking stuff." As far as she knew, Dread's accounting data was still live and connected, her own gear waiting for further search requests. She cursed herself for not having done the prudent thing and copied the files she was examining to her own system. She had a desperate, clammy feeling that if he found out, something worse than the usual firing might be the result. She tried to calm her unsteady voice and speak lightly. "I've been doing this for hours and I'm ragged, utterly. Are you up for a while?"
He cocked his head. "Why?"
"I don't know. Could we go out and get some dinner, something? Just get out of here for an hour or two?"
Something moved behind his dark eyes; she prayed she hadn't caught him in
a suspicious mood. "Right," he said after a moment. "Why not? Are you buying?"
She forced herself to laugh. "Sure. Just let me tidy up a few things. . . ."
While Dread was pulling on clothes, Dulcie closed and locked off everything, then ran her cleanup gear. She was trembling so badly she had to set her pad down on a table-top so she didn't drop it again.
How can he move so quietly? He got out of that thing and walked all the way across the room behind me and I never heard him. Maybe he really is a vampire. It wasn't a very good joke, not at the moment. She finished and turned off her pad, then wiped her sleeve across her face. The room was cool, but she was sweating.
Maybe Renfield needs to think about getting into another line of work. . . .
Dread was quite charming over dinner, flashing those white teeth, playfully exaggerating his Aussie machismo to try to make her laugh. If Dulcie had been meeting him for the first time she would have been quite taken by his stories of the strange places and even stranger folk he had met in his peculiar line of work. If it had been even a week earlier, she might have had that third glass of wine, even a fourth, and let herself descend into warm compliance. Instead, she spent the entire meal thinking about how close she had come to being caught, wondering every time he gave her one of his penetrating looks whether he was about to reveal that he knew what she had been doing.
Whether he suspected her of misbehavior or not, there was definitely something going on beneath the surface. Dread had always been subject to oddly high-flown, almost feverish bouts of enthusiasm. That was going on tonight, but it was twinned somehow with the watchful Dread she also knew, as though he were keeping a tight rein on himself because he knew he was on the brink of letting go entirely. As they walked back from the cafe he fell silent, looking neither at her nor the rain-spattered streets, but keeping his eyes fixed at a point somewhere above the invisible horizon. There was an unusual bounce in his step, a subtle but consistent flexing of muscles, as though he alone of all humanity had overcome gravity but had decided to maintain the pretense of obeying it.