by Tad Williams
"I won't keep you here any longer than I have to," Sellars told her. "So let's get to work."
She found the machine he wanted after a few minutes' search, holding up her ring to give him a chance to double-check. She took the gray rectangle out of her backpack. "Do I push it into one of these holes?"
"No, just set it against the ends of those bits sticking out, then square it up. May I see? Excellent. Now hold it flat." There was a click; the gray box vibrated for a moment under Olga's hand. "You can let go now." She did. The box remained in place. "Why don't you go sit somewhere—out of view of the door, just to be on the safe side. This will take me a short while."
Olga found an old swivel chair in a niche behind some of the equipment and collapsed into it gratefully. There was nothing to do but stare at the rows and rows of almost featureless machines. She might have dozed for a few minutes. When she woke up she was shivering from the chill and Sellars was again in her ear.
"There's something wrong."
She was suddenly alert, heart speeding. "Someone is coming?"
"No. It's just . . . this is the wrong room. The wrong equipment. As far as I can tell, none of this machinery has any connection to the Grail Network. It's all just the regular J Corporation telecom infrastructure. There's got to be another plan room—something very large."
"So what do we do now?" She was tired and could not help feeling a little resentful. It was one thing to turn your destiny over to mysterious strangers, but when those strangers had apparently sent you on a wild goose chase, it was another thing altogether.
"I truly don't know, Olga. I'll have to spend some time on the problem. I'll come back to you in one hour. In the meantime, take the tap off that machinery, then I think you should go to that storage room we talked about and wait. I've keyed your badge for it. If you go now, you can be there in five minutes. I'll massage the stair cameras."
"More stairs."
"I'm afraid so."
The storage room took up much of a floor, a huge warren full of stacks of unopened shipping boxes and unused furniture. Once Sellars looped the surveillance signal, Olga made her way to a far corner and settled herself behind a set of privacy screens in the most comfortable executive chair she could find.
She dozed again, and woke up thinking how strange it was that she should be here in the very center of the black tower, the thing she had seen in so many dreams, and yet the children who had led her to this place had vanished like shadows in the sun. The silence in her head was almost painful.
There was silence of another kind, too. She checked her internal display. Almost two hours gone. Sellars or Catur Ramsey should have called her by now. She stood and stretched, limbering herself, then found the storage facility's restroom. When she had finished, she called Sellars. There was no answer. She called Ramsey but he wasn't answering either, so she left a message for him.
It's a hard problem, this one, she guessed, and settled in to wait a bit longer.
Two hours turned into three. Olga felt a cold certainty settle on her like mist. They weren't going to call. Something was wrong—very wrong.
Four hours became five, then six. The dim safety lights high overhead continued in permanent twilight. The stacks of boxes stretched away like dozens of cardboard Stone-henges, stashed and forgotten by busy Druids. Olga's certainty had hardened into something frozen and miserable.
She was alone in the middle of the black tower. First the children had left her, now Ramsey and the man Sellars. She had been deserted again.
"I can make no sense of it," Sellars finished.
Ramsey tried to look helpfully attentive, but Sellars' explanation had lost him some time back. "Well, there must be some other equipment in the building somewhere."
"No," the old man said, "it's not that simple. All the data lines from that building come out of that patch room and get handed over to the telecom providers. And every thing in the building—even Jongleur's private offices and residence at the top of the tower—pumps out through those lines. I couldn't be missing anything as significant as the amount of throughput needed to manage the Grail network. It would be like hiding the data from all of NASA."
"Nassau?" Ramsey frowned. "The Bahamas?"
"Never mind. Before your time." Sellars took a moment to inhale through a chemical-scented rag clutched in his knobby hand, a rag that had begun to seem as much a part of him as the kerchief of a Versailles courtier. Ramsey thought the old man's breathing seemed worse just in the last two days, and could not help wondering how long a being so frail could endure this kind of stress. "But I must come up with something," Sellars continued. "Your Ms. Pirofsky is waiting patiently for a call back."
"I don't understand. You've already hacked into the Otherland system, haven't you? So why can't you find it now?"
"Because I've never been able to hack into it from Felix Jongleur's end." Sellars sighed and lowered the rag. "That's why I thought Olga's . . . incursion, for lack of a better word, might prove to be a help. I've never been able to touch the operating system, no matter what I tried. I got into the network through the Telemorphix end, where the gross maintenance of the system is done. I've been in and out of Telemorphix at will for years. I might as well be drawing a paycheck." His smile was perfunctory.
Ramsey shrugged. "So what do we do?"
"I don't know. I just. . . ." For a moment he physically faltered, then raised a shaking hand to his face as though surprised to find his head still attached. "Time is pressing now. And there are other things pulling at my attention. Any one of them might be crucial."
"Can I do anything to help?"
"Possibly. Just having you listening . . . it forces me . . . it forces me to make a little order out of the chaos. Sometimes we think we know things too well, and it's only when we try to explain them. . . ." He straightened. "Look. I will show you one of the matters that is tugging at me most strongly."
The wallscreen sprang to life in a blaze of pure light. Ramsey jumped. A moment later, the image resolved into the tangle of strange greenery that Sellars called his Garden.
"I've seen this before," Ramsey said gently.
"Not this you haven't." Sellars gestured and part of the picture jumped forward into magnified resolution. A cluster of fungus, gray and sickly, but still somehow with the shine of a new thing, had erupted from the ground around the base of one of the more complicated plants. "It just happened today, while I was working with Olga. I had all kinds of alarm messages waiting for me when I got off the line with her."
"What is it?"
"It's the operating system," Sellars said. "The Grail network operating system. Or rather, it's a pattern that looks like what the operating system does when it singles something within the network out for attention—a sort of locus of special interest."
"I have no idea what any of that means," Ramsey said, "but I guess I'm learning to be comfortable with complete and chronic ignorance. And I have to say that I'm impressed—you're the first person I've ever heard actually use the word 'locus' in conversation."
He won another smile from the old man. "What it means is that for the first time since the system went haywire, for lack of a better word, I've found a symptom of the operating system within the network. Well, the operating system is everywhere in the network, of course, but the part of it that seems intelligent, that seems to make actual choices, has been absent since things broke down. Now it's back."
"And that means. . . ?"
"In the past, as I think I told you, it was the method I used to locate my volunteers within the network. So perhaps what this concentration of attention represents is the location of the poor people I've put into danger—the people who have been hidden from me for days." He closed his eyes, thinking. "One of the reasons I wanted to get into the system from Jongleur's end was so I could bypass the network's very fierce security and have a proper chance to search for them myself. And there they are—maybe. God only knows how long this opportunity will last."
> "Sounds like you need to try to contact them again,"
"I agree—if I can get in. As I think I told you, the system hasn't even allowed me to sneak Cho-Cho into the network the last few times I've tried." He paused for a moment, consulting some private source of information. "I have half an hour before I told Ms. Pirofsky I'd get back to her. That should be plenty of time for the attempt, even if it's successful—I've never been able to hold off the network security systems for more than a few minutes." He nodded toward the door separating their room from the Sorensens'. "I'll need your help. It may work differently when the boy's not asleep."
"The boy?"
"Of course, the boy. I doubt things have changed enough for the system to allow me in by myself." He inhaled from the cloth again. "But as I said, it may work differently this time—I've never tried it when Cho-Cho was awake. You can make sure he doesn't fall off the couch."
All three Sorensens stood in the doorway, watching with the sickened fascination of bystanders at the scene of an accident, even though nothing had happened yet. Christabel in particular looked frightened, and Ramsey felt a sudden tug of shame. As grown-ups, they had all failed these two kids pretty thoroughly, at least when it came to shielding them from life's uglier moments.
"Oh, for goodness' sake," Sellars said testily. "I can't get anything accomplished with you all hovering over me. Leave me alone with the boy. Mr. Ramsey will be able to help me if I need anything."
"I still don't understand what you're going to do to him, but I know I don't like it," Kaylene Sorensen declared. "Just because he's a poor little Mexican boy. . . ."
Ramsey saw Sellars bristle. "Madam, he's as much an American as you are, and certainly has a greater claim to it than I do, since I wasn't even born here." His glare softened. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Sorensen. You have every right to be worried. I apologize. I am . . . very tired. Please try not to worry. We have done this several times, Cho-Cho and I. But I do need some privacy so I can concentrate. Time is growing short. Please."
She set her jaw, but took her daughter by the hand and pulled her away from the door. "Come on, Christabel. Let's go out and sit by the pool. I'll get you an ice cream."
"Be careful, Mister Sellars," the little girl called, hesitating in the doorway. "And . . . and take care of Cho-Cho, okay?"
"I promise, little Christabel." Sellars sagged a little as the girl and her mother disappeared.
Major Sorensen was the last to leave. "I'll be in the next room," he said as he shut the door. "Holler if you need me."
Cho-Cho had pushed himself to the far end of the couch where he waited like a trapped animal. "What you think you gonna do?"
"Just what we have done before, Señor Izabal. Except this time, you're going to be awake. I'm going to send you through to that other place."
"How come awake?"
"Because I can't afford to wait until tonight. My friends might have moved again by then."
The boy scowled. "What you want me to do?"
"For now, just lie down."
Cho-Cho did so, but with the kind of careful attention that suggested he expected at any moment to be hit with something. It was not hard to see the fear under the bluster.
If people's insides were their outsider, Ramsey thought, it would be this kid, not Sellars, who was scar tissue from head to toe.
Sellars leaned forward until he could lay a trembling hand along the boy's neck. Cho-Cho shook him off and sat up. "What you doing, loco? Touching me and all that mierda?"
The old man signed. "Señor Izabal, I strongly suggest you lie down and shut up. I'm just making contact with that thing in your neck, your neurocannula." He turned to Ramsey. "I could actually just narrowcast to it, but it's a pretty shoddy piece of street engineering and I get less interference if I'm actually making contact."
"Hey! Me, I racked plenty efectivo on that, old man."
"You were robbed, sonny." Sellars laughed weakly. "No, don't get angry, I'm just teasing. It does the job well enough."
Cho-Cho lay back along the couch. "Just don't get funny."
Sellars made contact again. "Close your eyes, please." When the boy had done so, the old man shut his own, lifting his face blindly toward the ceiling. "Do you see the light yet, my young friend?"
"Kind of. All gray, like."
"Good. Now just wait. If everything goes well, in a few minutes you should find yourself inside the network, as you have before—that place you admired so much. You'll have my voice in your ear. Don't do anything until I tell you."
Cho-Cho's mouth had fallen slackly open. His fingers, pressed into fists only moments before, uncurled.
"Now. . . ." said Sellars, then fell silent. He was still as stone, but unlike Cho-Cho, he seemed not unconscious but vastly absorbed, as distant as a meditating holy man.
Ramsey watched, feeling as nearly useless as he ever had. The silence continued long enough that he was just beginning to wonder if flicking on the wallscreen for some news would interfere with whatever Sellars was doing when the old man jerked upright in his chair, his hand snapping away from the boy's neck as though the skin there had burned him.
"What is it?" Ramsey hurried to Sellars' side, but the old man did not speak. He twitched violently and his eyes opened wide then squeezed shut. A moment later he collapsed forward. If Ramsey had not wrapped his arms around the thin body, light as a bundle of sticks, Sellars would have fallen onto the floor. Ramsey pushed him back upright, but the old man only lolled in the chair, limp and silent. The boy still lay on the couch, equally slack, equally still. Ramsey tried to shake Sellars awake, then sprang to the boy, his desperation increasing with each second. The boy's head bounced on the cushions as Ramsey tried to bring him back, but lay still when Ramsey stopped.
"They're both still breathing." Sorensen let go of Sellars' wrist and stood up. "Their pulses feel regular."
"If this is Tandagore, that doesn't mean anything," Ramsey said bitterly. "My clients . . . their daughter has had normal pulse and respiration for months, the whole time she's been in a coma. Her friend did, too—he's dead now."
"Jesus." Sorensen jammed his hands in his pockets—to make it less obvious how helpless he felt, Ramsey suspected. "Jee-zuss. What the hell kind of situation are we in now?"
"The same as we were, just a bit worse." Ramsey felt so heavy he could not imagine how he would ever stand up again. "Should we take them to a hospital?"
"I don't know. Shit." Sorensen walked across the room to sit down in the other chair. There would have been room on the couch, since the unconscious child stretched only two thirds of the length, but Ramsey was not surprised by the major's choice. "Does being in the hospital help those other Tangadore kids?"
"Tandagore. No. Well, I suppose it keeps them from getting bedsores." A thought flickered past. "And they have to be fed with a drip. And catheterized, I guess."
"Catheterized. . . ? Christ." Major Sorensen seemed more depressed than frightened—Catur Ramsey wished he could say the same of himself. "I'd better go tell Kay what's going on." He frowned. "I don't know how we'll be able to take them to a hospital. The kid, yeah, but we put an advisory out on Sellars from the base to every emergency room on the Eastern seaboard, because we thought he'd be having breathing problems. Shit. Breathing's about the only thing he isn't having problems with right now."
"Don't look at me, Major. Sellars was in charge of this whole thing. I was just along for the ride."
Sorensen regarded him with something like sympathy. "Yeah. Some ride, huh, Ramsey?"
"Yeah. Some ride."
When Sorensen had disappeared through the connecting door, Ramsey went looking for his pad, hoping that he had some first-aid information on Tandagore in the research he had done for the Frederickses. When he picked it up, the small device was vibrating.
Oh, my God, he thought. It must be Olga. She's been waiting for at least an hour—she must be panicked. But what can I tell her? He fumbled the device open to take the call. I have only the most g
eneral idea of what Sellars was trying to do, and not a clue as to how he was going to go about it.
"Olga?" he said.
"No." The voice was Spectrally faint, perforated with dropouts. "No, Ramsey, it's me."
He recognized it. His hackles rose. He could not help staring at the boneless, broken shape in the wheelchair. "Sellars? How. . . ?"
"I'm not dead, Mr. Ramsey. Just . . . very busy."
"What happened? You—your body's here. You and the boy are both. . . ."
"I know. And I have very little time to talk. The system is collapsing—dying, I think. I don't know if I can get it to release its hold on the boy—or on me, for that matter. . . ." For a moment the transmission simply stopped—a pure slash of emptiness—then Sellars' whispery voice returned. ". . . vitally important. We have to find the operating system's data path so we can tap into it. Everything depends on that. You must help Olga Pirofsky. . . ."
The signal failed this time for so long that Ramsey was certain he had lost him. Sellars' living body mocked him with its silence.
". . . And don't do anything drastic with either of us. I'll reopen the connection hourly, if I can. . . ." Sellars' voice faded again. This time, it did not return.
Ramsey stared at the pad, now as mute as the old man and the sleeping boy.
"No!" he said, not even aware he spoke out loud. "No, you can't—I don't know what to do! Come back, damn you! Come back!"
Christabel could tell from the way her father was whispering to her mother that something was really wrong. She was so busy watching them talking with their heads close together that she forgot all about her ice cream until it fell off the stick and landed in a big cold blob on her foot.