Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "We will all die. It is what gives life its shape and even its beauty, perhaps, this fact of its brevity. So why bother to do anything except gratify oneself, faced with that? And knowing it may come literally at any moment, as we do, why not simply surrender?

  "I do not know. But I know now I cannot.

  "I told the pair from the Circle, 'I do not think the little monkeys have been captured. Dread wanted to break your spirit—he likes that even more than inflicting pain. And he truly wanted to make you tell all you knew about Renie and the rest of us. So if the guards had caught them, he would have threatened you with harming them. He would have been delighted to do it.'

  " 'Maybe they escaped, then,' Bonnie Mae Simpkins said. 'The Lord keep 'em safe—I sure hope they did escape, poor little creatures.' I could almost feel her calling on a few last dregs of optimism, and again was shamed by the comparison with my own earlier behavior.

  "Florimel remembered what Orlando and Fredericks had said about Nandi's expertise, so she asked Nandi if it was possible to open a gateway here in the prison cell. Slowly and with great pain—I think several of his ribs are broken, although that is an odd thing to consider since we are all wearing virtual bodies—he explained that he could only open a gate at a designated spot, and certainly there was no such thing in these prison rooms. As he spoke I began to think in earnest about what was possible and what was not, remembering that as much as it might seem like it, we were not actually prisoners in a temple of stone, but in the idea of a temple.

  "Slowly, other ideas came to me. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would burst the doors or slay the guards, but enough to give me occupation, for which I was grateful. When Nandi had finished his explanation, I asked the others to be silent for a while. Even T4b—who in fact has been as reserved as I have ever seen him since Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins were thrown in with us—did not protest.

  "This virtual universe is constructed on stories, it seems, and I suspect that in part that is my own fault. I believe I helped to feed the Other the first tales on which the system has created and defined itself, and particularly the story which appears to define its hopes, if one can say such a thing about an artificial intelligence. And in our way, we have each of us become defined as though we were characters—Renie the bold and sometimes overly stubborn hero, !Xabbu her wise companion, Paul the one buffeted by fate, a mystery to himself and others. For a long time I had thought my role was clear. I was the blind seeress—I even made a joke of it in the indicators I used to mark my journal entries for later salvage. But with !Xabbu helping me I had accomplished more than that, opening a gate where no others could have managed. In fact, the unusual senses this place gives me have allowed me many times to do what my friends could not.

  "Apparently, I am a sorceress—a witch. A good witch. I hope.

  "Here, within this invented world, I have powers. As I sat in the cell thinking about Nandi's struggles to make the system work, I realized that I have not fully tapped those powers. And what better time to do so than now, with Dread to arrive at any moment?

  "I asked my companions for quiet, then did my best to grasp what lay beyond the walls of our small cell. When I have reached out in this way before, in the House world or the Place of the Lost, it has always been in the open, where I could read information from air currents and long echoes, even if I could not always identify them as such. My abilities seemed an extension of natural senses, so I have always thought of them as limited in the same way, but I had just realized I did not know this to be true. Thus, as my friends waited in confused, fearful silence, I opened up and tried to see, hear, feel—there really are no proper words—what lay outside.

  "Exploring the ways of the system with !Xabbu, I had always felt a fundamental separation between his perceptions of it and mine, something which the symbology of the string game and its mathematical underpinnings had helped to bridge but had never fully eliminated. Now I began to think of what that separation meant—why, after all, should a young man with so little experience of the information sphere grasp things that I, with years of study plus the altered and enhanced perceptions the network granted me, could only barely understand? The reason, I have come to realize, is that I am limited by my own expectations. !Xabbu was taught by his people to absorb everything the world gives him and then, after sifting out the most important details, to act on them. But he is also clever and supremely flexible. Faced with a new world, he did not try to force it to comply with his expectations, but began all over to learn the rules, without prejudice as to where the information came from.

  "But I—along with all the rest of us, I suppose—have been fooled by the way this network mimics reality, and have tried to make sense of the world as though it were in fact the real world. Even using the astonishing abilities I have here, I have allowed myself to hear only what could be heard, touch only what could be touched, and then channeled that data into something safely like the real-world model. The irony of this—that a blind woman should so desperately struggle to make a place where she is superior to her companions into something more like the real world in which she was inferior to them—is almost staggering.

  "So what would !Xabbu do? Even in the midst of horror and despair, I smiled at the thought. What would !Xabbu do? He would open himself. He would let what was around him speak and he would listen without prejudice instead of trying to force the information into some orderly, preconceived scheme.

  "I tried to do the same.

  "The first thing I discovered was that I was still terrified despite my outward show of calm. My heart was speeding, and the sound of Paul Jonas taking a startled breath as the guards seized him was still fresh in my thoughts, as though the echo of it were immortalized within our prison cell. That thought gave me another idea, which I put aside for a moment, concentrating instead on calming and clearing my mind. I did my best, but I am far too weak to learn that kind of serenity in a matter of minutes.

  "It was difficult to lose the idea of the cell walls and in fact the entire temple as a real and solid thing. I suppose that for mystics and scientists it takes a similar effort of will to perceive the physical world as only a coherence of energy. I had dim inklings of what lay beyond our prison-sound information, smells—and to me they were already more significant than they would have been for any of my companions, but I needed more than that. I had to let myself feel them as equally significant to the things happening within the cell itself, until the walls began to blur into insignificance, until the signature of the simulated obstacles was only another piece of information. I had to learn to look through the walls, not at them, to put it in the language of the seeing.

  "It took a long time, but when it happened, it was quite sudden—a single twist of perception, then I could feel the information arrayed in front of me, layer upon layer, the information of the guards in the corridor outside just as significant as that of my companions in the cells. One of them was scratching his head. I laughed. It felt a bit like discovering a trick, like that childhood day when I first learned to ride a two-wheeled bicycle. I moved cautiously to expand my survey, tracing the knitted expression of the wall-information on the corridor's far side, then sliding through it, as it were, to examine other corridors and rooms.

  "This ability is not by any means limitless. The farther from myself I aim my perception, and the more barriers I penetrate, the less reliable the information. A hundred meters away from our cell the signature of a person—a sim pretending to be a person, that is—was little more than a humanoid shape, identifiable mostly because of movement. Twice that distance and only movement itself was noticeable. As my attention roved, I found several clusters of human shapes and movement, any one of which might have been Paul and his captors, but they were too far away for definite identification.

  "I let my perceptions travel farther outward, looking for the energy-shadow of a gateway, the thing that lingers even when the gateway itself is closed. I found one at last which seems to be just at the edg
e or just outside of the temple-palace, but by this time my head was pounding. I surfaced, returning to the cell and my companions, and told them what I had discovered. I asked Nandi a few questions, and his answers confirmed Orlando's description of him as an expert on the network's internal travel mechanisms. Armed with this extension of my own investigations of the gateways, I let myself reach out to find the gateway again.

  "It was more difficult this time. I was weary and my head ached, but I needed to examine the gateway to make sure it was functioning. Strangely, although it seemed open and in working order, I could not access the usual gateway information. But at least it seemed like it would take us somewhere else, and right now, that is our main need.

  "I barely had time to explain this to the others before exhaustion pulled me down and I slept like a dead thing. When I woke, perhaps an hour later, the tiny bit of good cheer my news had roused in the others had turned back into a miserable silence, since as long as we were trapped in a cell, even a nearby gateway might as well have been on the moon.

  "Despite feeling like my skull was made of old, brittle glass, I decided to try something different. Time was running out—time is running out. I could not afford to wait until I felt better, since Dread might appear at any moment, but I did not want to raise anyone's hopes either.

  "In fact, although I experienced some success with this last attempt, there is still little about which to be hopeful.

  "Again I let myself open. For a moment I feared I had lost the knack, that the walls would remain solidly impenetrable, but I thought of !Xabbu and calmed myself and at last the shift came. I reached out, not in any one direction, but generally, letting my attention flow diffusely outward through the information patterns. I was looking for something less specific than the signature of a gateway, and the farther away from the cell I went exploring, the harder it was to sift through the information.

  "I had nearly given up when I found something that seemed a possibility. It was a nested confusion of signatures, of small movements, on the far side of the temple. From what I could discern it was located in a sort of alcove, perhaps a niche behind a cloth hanging, which was worrisome. The second and less-formed part of my plan would be very difficult if it was.

  With the location fixed in my mind I surfaced again. My head was throbbing even more painfully now, but I had only to consider what Nandi and Bonnie Mae Simpkins had endured, and what we all could still expect, to drag myself up off the floor and move toward the door of the cell, where I lay down with my face against the open space at the bottom.

  " 'What are you doing?' Florimel asked worriedly. 'Are you having trouble breathing?'

  " 'I need silence now more than ever!' I told her. 'Please, just be patient for me. Try not to move if you can help it.'

  "I turned my ear to the crack under the door and listened. I listened in the same way I had let all my senses roam, but with a narrowing of focus. All I wanted now was sound, in any form I could perceive it. I imagined the temple as a two-dimensional maze and did my best to locate and chart the movement of air currents, following back along the track I had navigated earlier until I could detect the quiet rustle and murmur from the alcove. Describing it, I make it easier than it was, not out of false modesty—it was astoundingly difficult—but because I am running short of time to describe what happened.

  "Once I had heard the excruciatingly faint sounds I sought, I began the hardest part of all. I turned my face and spoke a soft, almost silent word to the crack under the door, then followed its progress. The coherence of the wave of sound dissipated quickly, vanishing into diffused silence by the end of the corridor.

  "Someone, I think it was T4b, moved behind me, and to my fiercely-straining senses it was like the roar of the ocean. It was all I could do not to scream at my companions. Instead, I tried again.

  "It took me the better part of two hours, and could have taken forever if I had not had the wonderful luck that the corridors I was using were mostly deserted. It was like plotting the most complicated billiard shot in the universe, trying to move a small sequence of sound from one end of the temple to the other—bouncing off walls, caroming around corners, all dependent on nearly microscopic differences in the initial direction and on excellent guesses about the swirl of air currents. Still, for all my painstaking care, the fact that I eventually succeeded was mostly luck.

  "It was easier to hear the reply, although it took some moments drifting back, No one but me could have heard it—in fact, the sound wave was so small I was not really hearing it, but reading it.

  " 'Who that?' it said. 'How you know Zunni's name? How you know Wicked Tribe?'

  "It was too difficult to carry on a conversation—it would have taken hours of hit and miss—and based on the stories I had been told, I did not have the highest belief in the patience of the Wicked Tribe children. I banked my entire roll on one message.

  " 'We are friends of Orlando Gardiner's. We are locked in a prison cell here in the temple. They are going to hurt us. We need help right now.'

  "I heard no reply back. A guard had begun to talk in the corridor outside, blasting the subtle pipeline of space and movement into crazy ripples.

  "So that is that. It is a ridiculously unlikely possibility that they even heard the whole of my message, or that they can do anything about it, but it was the only plan I could devise. At least I was right in my guess that the monkey-children were still hiding in the temple. And against all odds I have told someone that we are here, that we need help. The fact that our safety is now dependent on a group of preschool children leaves us no worse off then we were, if not a great deal better.

  "Still, although Bonnie Mae Simpkins was happy to hear that the children had survived, I think the rest of my companions were depressed to hear of the slim thread I had expended so much time and energy constructing, and on which our hopes now hung.

  "However, I was so tired and felt so sick at that point that I was not even afraid of Dread—would not have cared if Satan himself had knocked on the cell door. I fell asleep almost immediately despite my head banging like a drum. Now I am awake again, but nothing has changed. My head still aches, a persistent throb that I fear will never leave me. Poor Paul Jonas is suffering God alone knows what kind of punishments. The rest of us still wait for death—or worse. We wait for Dread. And perhaps I have accomplished nothing—perhaps I am a failure as a witch. But at least I have done . . . something.

  "If I am to die soon, that might be a little solace. A little.

  "Code Delphi. End here."

  He was tied and helpless, his back bent across the curved stone table so that he felt the merest touch would split open his belly. In the dim, torchlit chamber the yellow face of Ptah hovered like a sickly sun.

  "Comfy?"

  Paul struggled against the bonds that were already rubbing skin from his wrists and ankles. "Why are you doing this, Wells?"

  "Because I want to know." He straightened up and told the guard who had tied Paul, "Go find Userhotep."

  "But I don't know myself! You can't torture someone into telling something he doesn't know!"

  Robert Wells shook his head in mock sadness. "Oh, but I can. This isn't the real world anymore, Jonas. This is something much more complicated—more interesting, too."

  "Interesting enough to get you killed if your new master doesn't like what you're doing to me."

  His captor laughed. "Oh, I'll leave plenty for him to play with, don't worry. But first we're going to try a few tricks of our own." He looked up at the sound of footsteps. "And here's the chief trickster himself."

  "I live to serve you, O Lord of the White Walls." The man who spoke might have been old or young—it was hard to tell in the shadowy chamber, and was made more difficult by the fleshy smoothness of the stranger's features. He was not fat—his arms showed hints of terrifying muscle beneath the unusually pale skin—but he was rounded, almost curvaceous, and had the sexless look of a eunuch.

  "Userhotep is a very special
person," Wells said solemnly. "A . . . damn, what's the term? There's a little snake that talks in my ear, but it almost never shuts up and I get tired of listening. Ah, right, a kheri-heb. A special kind of priest."

  "He's a torturer," Paul snapped. "And you're an arrogant criminal bastard, Wells. Does your snake-gear have an Egyptian translation for that?"

  "You know it already. The term is . . . a god." Robert Wells smiled. "But Userhotep is far more skilled than any mere torturer. He's a lector priest. That means a magician. And he's going to help you tell me everything you know. And everything you don't know, too."

  Userhotep moved closer, raising his hands above Paul's unprotected belly. When Paul flinched, the priest frowned slightly, but his eyes remained as empty as the glazed stare of a fish.

  No, a shark, Paul thought miserably. Something that uses its teeth just because it has them.

  "No need to squirm," Wells said. "The painful bit is a pretty small part of the whole operation—I just mentioned it to give your cellmates something to think about. No, Userhotep here is going to cast a spell over you, then you're going to sing like a canary."

  "You've been in here too long if you think some of Jongleur's ancient Egyptian mumbo-jumbo is going to make me tell you anything." He strained against the ropes, lifting his head until he could look into Userhotep's epicene face. "You're code, did you know that? You don't even exist. You're imaginary—a bunch of numbers in a big machine!"

  Wells chuckled. "He won't hear anything that doesn't fit in with the simulation, Jonas. And it's you who doesn't understand much if you think this . . . mumbo-jumbo won't affect you."

  Userhotep bent. When he stood again a long bronze blade was in his hand, more like a straight razor than a dagger. Before Paul had time to react, the priest swiped it across his chest. He had made three shallow cuts before Paul felt the burning pain of the first.