by Tad Williams
"Hear me!" Martine called out. "Set, Other, whatever your name is—do you remember me? We have met before, I think."
The sarcophagus lay secretive as an unhatched egg. The shuddering made Paul stagger to keep his balance.
"What is this psycho place?" demanded the white silhouette fearfully.
Bonita Mae Simpkins was praying. "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . ."
"Listen! I am Martine Desroubins," she said to the low black box. "I taught you the story of the boy in the well. Can you hear me? I am trapped here in this simulation world, and so are many others that you brought into your network. Some of them are children. If you do not help us, we will die." The moment stretched. They could hear the roar of the approaching monster's breath, hissing like a sandstorm. "It will not listen to me," Martine said at last, her voice raw with despair. "I cannot make it listen."
The ground shivered so violently that the whole temple seemed to shift around them. Trickles of rock dust filtered down the walls; Bonnie Mae and T4b were knocked off their feet. Then the footsteps stopped. Even the monstrous sound of breathing was stilled.
Paul licked his lips. It was almost impossible to speak. "Try . . . try again, Martine."
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and put her hands to her head. "Help us, whatever you are—whoever you are. God damn it, I can feel you listening to me! I know you are hurting, but these children will be killed! Help us!"
Something exploded like a bomb above their heads. There was a second concussive crash, then another and another. Flung onto his back, Paul could only stare upward in horror as huge fingers poked through the rocky walls at the top of the great temple. A moment later, with a sustained smash of sound and a rain of falling stones, the entire roof of the cavernous chamber tore free and rose up into the air. A boulder the size of a small car rolled unsteadily past Paul and crashed into the far wall, but he could not even move. Sunlight blazed in, the limitless desert sky now spread above them once more.
The monstrous jackal-headed figure shifted the roof to one side and dropped it. Stone dust boiled up like a mushroom cloud as the giant leaned into the gaping wound that had been the top of the temple room. It smiled, tongue lolling out from jaws that could gulp a Tyrannosaurus like a boiled chicken.
"I'M NOT VERY HAPPY WITH YOU LOT," rumbled Anubis. More stone and dust showered from the crumbling walls. "YOU LEFT BEFORE THE PARTY STARTED—AND THAT'S A BIT RUDE."
Only Martine was standing, still swaying beside the sarcophagus. Paul crawled toward her, intent on pulling her down before the monster reached in and beheaded her like a dandelion puff.
"Help us," he heard her say again. It was little more than a whisper.
"WELL, WELL. WHAT'S THAT WIGGLING ALONG THE FLOOR?" the thing said gleefully.
The sarcophagus began to come apart. Cracks streamed along its angled edges, red light leaking like blood; a moment later the whole thing shifted inside out, as though it contained not the corpse of a god but some new dimension of space-time, unfolding and expanding like a slow-motion detonation until the utter black and the bright, bright glaring red were all Paul could see.
"It's screaming. . . !" he heard Martine cry, her own voice cracked with agony, but she was fading like a dying signal. "The children are. . . ." Paul's head seemed to be filling with fog—chill, empty, dead.
"WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL. . . ?" was the last thing he heard—a thunderous bellow from above, but already curiously muffled—then even that stone-shattering noise dwindled away as Paul was swallowed by silence and nothingness.
Growling wordlessly, sputtering saliva that fell like rain onto the dusty floor, Dread scrabbled in the debris for long moments, like a child who has discovered nothing in his birthday-present box but tissue paper. They were gone.
The growl rose to a choking snarl of rage. Black spots burst before his eyes like negative stars. He kicked over a temple wall, sent another crashing down with a flailing hand, then bent in the swirling dust and grabbed a stone obelisk. He snapped it loose from its base and hurled it as far as he could. A puff of desert sand marked its distant landing.
When he had smashed the entire temple complex into lumps of crumbling sandstone, he stood in the wreckage. The anger was still there, pressing on the front of his brain until he felt it might catch fire. He threw back his head and howled, but it brought no relief. When the echoes had died in the distant mountains, the desert was silent again, still empty but for himself.
He closed his eyes and screamed, "Anwin!"
It took several seconds before she responded, and through each of those seconds a pulse beat in his skull like a hammerblow. When the window opened, hovering in midair against the desert sky, her eyes were wide with shock and surprise. He didn't know if she was seeing his real self or the mountainous form of Anubis, god of the dead. At that moment, he didn't care.
"What? What is it?" She was sitting in a chair—the angle suggested she was seeing him on her pad instead of the wallscreen. She looked not just startled but guilty and for a fleeting instant his rage cooled enough to wonder why that might be. Then he thought of Martine and her little friends winking out right beneath his fingers and the choking rage fumed up inside him again.
"I'm on the network," he gasped, trying to tame his fury enough to communicate, when what he really wanted to do was tear down the universe and stamp on it. "A connection has just . . . opened up. I need to follow it—go through. It's something to do with the operating system." The operating system itself had defied him—that was the most galling part. When he realized what was happening he had sent a bolt of pain through it that should have frozen every function. He had half-thought he would destroy the thing once and for all, but had been too angry to care. Instead, it had absorbed the punishment and acted anyway. somewhere. It had defied him! And they had defied him, too. They would all pay.
"I'll . . . I'll see what I can do," she stammered. "It may take a little while."
"Now!" he shrieked. "Before it closes completely, or disappears, or whatever. Now!"
Her eyes wide with something more animal than mere guilt, more electric than surprise, she bent to her machinery.
"It's still there," she said. "You're right. But it's just a backdoor in the programming."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It's a way in and a way out of the network, except it only seems to open inward. I can't explain because I don't really understand." Her terror had been subsumed by concentration, although he could see her fingers trembling above the screen. Even in his white-hot rage he could admire her all-deflecting absorption, her total love for what she did.
Kindred souls, in a way, he thought. But still different enough that my kind of soul has to eat your kind of soul. He would take care of her when he had finished destroying Martine and the others—had the Sulaweyo bitch been with them? He hadn't had time to notice—and after he had reduced every last bit of volition in the operating system into whimpering imbecility.
"I've hooked it up for you as best I can," she said at last. "It's a bit like one of the gateways in other parts of the. . . ."
"Go away now," he said, disconnecting her. He narrowed his focus until he could almost see the dwindling point of transit like a will-o'-the-wisp still floating above the shattered sarcophagus. He could feel his twist strong within him, glowing like a hot wire in his forebrain, roused without his intention, as sometimes happened when he was hunting. Well, I'm hunting now, he thought. Too right I am. They had mocked him, the freaks, and now they thought they were safe. I'm going to find them all, then I'm going to pull them into pieces, until there's nothing left but screaming.
He stepped through, a god with a heart of black fire. A mad god.
Paul could only lie in the dust, struggling to remember where he was, who he was . . . why he was.
It had been like traveling through the center of a dying star. Everything had seemed to collapse into infinite density; for a time he could not measure, he had
thought he was dead, nothing but particles of consciousness dispersing in the void, moving farther and farther apart like ships lost from their convoy until communication failed and each became a solitary mote.
He was still not entirely certain that he was alive.
Paul pushed himself up from the ground, which was as dry and dusty as the courtyards of the Temple of Set. There was one huge improvement over Egypt: the sky was gray, spattered with distant stars, the temperature cool. Paul was at the base of a low hill, in the midst of a plain bumpy with other such hills. The landscape seemed strangely familiar.
Bonita Mae Simpkins sat up beside him, rubbing her head. "I'm hurting," she said in a flat voice.
"Me, too. Where are the others? Where are we, for that matter?"
"Inside, I think," said someone else.
Paul turned. Martine was making her way down the steep hillside, half-walking, half-sliding on the loose soil. She was trailed by Nandi, T4b, Florimel, and a boy he didn't recognize—a small, dirty child with raggedly cut black hair. The Wicked Tribe, their color muted in the twilight, circled above them like a swarm of gnats.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "And who's that little boy?"
"This is Cho-Cho," Martine announced. "Sellars' friend. You already met him—he just looked a bit different. We've been having a talk, and now he's going to be traveling with us."
"Chance not, lady," the little boy said sullenly. "You people loco."
Martine and the others reached the bottom just as Paul and Bonnie Mae finally got onto their feet. Paul felt so weary and sore he immediately wanted to lie back down. He had questions, lots of questions, but no strength to ask them.
"As to where we are," Martine said, "I think we are inside the operating system."
"But I thought we'd been inside it along, more or less."
"No." She shook her head. "We have been inside the Grail network, and the operating system extends throughout that network like invisible nerves. But I think now we are inside the operating system itself, or at least some private preserve of its own, kept safe from all its masters, Jongleur and the Grail Brotherhood, and now Dread."
"Renie said . . . she was in the heart of the system," Paul remembered.
"How can you know such a thing?" Nandi said sharply. "It makes some sense, but it can only be a guess."
"Because I touched the Other before it brought us through," she said. "It did not speak to me in words, but I could still understand much. And because we have been to a place like this before. Twice, although the first version, the Patchwork World, was unfinished. I failed to understand the similarity on the last occasion, but I am now seeing the patterns for a third time."
"We've been here . . . before?" Paul examined the naggingly familiar terrain,
"Not here, but something much like it—a place built for us to meet our host on neutral ground. You were not with us for the first one, Paul Jonas, but you must remember the second."
"The mountain!"
"Exactly." Martine showed him a ghostly smile. "And I hope that we will again find the Other waiting for us. Maybe this time we will understand how to speak to it."
"So where are we going?" Florimel asked. "The hills look like they're a little lower heading that way. . . ."
"They are," Martine said shortly. "But we do not need the hills or the slope of the ground to know. I can perceive a great concentration of data waiting out there, something alive and active and unparalleled, just as I could feel it waiting on the mountaintop." For a moment she looked very tired and fearful. "That is not quite true. It seems different this time—smaller, weaker. I . . . I think that the Other is dying."
"How can that be?" Florimel demanded, "It's just an operating system—it's code!"
"But if it like, sixes out, what happens to us?" asked T4b.
Martine shook her head. "I do not know, but I fear the answers." She led the others across the shallow valley and up the slope of the nearest hill. They had walked only a few hundred meters when Paul felt a prickling on the back of his neck,. as if something were following him. He whirled but he could see nothing behind him in the colorless hills. Still, something troubled the air, a tension, a tightening of pressure, that made him reluctant to turn his back again.
Martine also swung around, slowly, searchingly. She found a direction and cocked her head to listen for a moment.
"Run," she said.
"What are you. . . ?" Florimel began, then the sky split open.
From nowhere, winds howled down on them and the ground trembled. The trembling became general, the air and the earth all vibrating in shuddering synchronization, then something huge appeared on the hilltop they had just deserted, something vague and dark and beastlike. Heat lightning crackled around its misshapen head. The thing was on its knees, howling in rage and what sounded like pain, a barking roar that made Paul's ears throb. More winds came shrieking through the hills flinging horizontal dust, so that he had to cover his eyes with his hands and peer through the cracks in his fingers.
"I told you, run!" Martine screamed. "It's Dread! He followed us through!"
The vast figure on the hillside writhed in pain; its howl rose in pitch. "Something's fighting him!" Paul shouted. "The system! It's fighting back!"
"The system is going to lose!" Martine grabbed his arm and yanked him forward, leading him a few stumbling steps up the hill. The Wicked Tribe blew past, squealing helplessly on the breast of a gale wind. Paul turned to grab at Bonnie Mae, who had fallen; when he dared a look back he could see the immense, murky figure struggling to rise to its feet, outscreaming the storm winds, the lightning now flashing and snapping around its misshapen head.
Paul turned away from the sight and began to run. Behind him the roar of the beast rose and rose until all the world seemed to vibrate to a single animal cry of rage. The sky darkened. Overhead, the stars began to die.
Dulcie's heart was hammering.
What's he doing? What was he so worked up about? I've never seen him like that, even in the middle of the Atasco raid. Whatever it is, it's not even something real—it's something in the network, for Christ's sake. So why was he screaming at me?
She carefully closed her pad, waiting for her pulse to slow. He's not watching you, she told herself. She glanced at Dread's body, motionless except for the slow roll of the bed's machinery, but knew it proved nothing. He could be observing her through hidden cameras—maybe even through her own pad.
No, she told herself sharply. That's bullshit. Through the wallscreen, maybe, but he can't get into my own system—I have better security than most governments. If he was capable of that kind of gearwork he wouldn't need me in the first place.
Dulcie knew she wasn't going to be able to work until her nerves stopped twitching. She started the water boiling for a cup of Earl Grey. The old-fashioned way was slow, but she'd tried instant hot-pack tea. Once had been enough.
He doesn't know what you're doing, she told herself. And as long as you're careful, he's not going to. Just clean everything up.
But a more cautious side of her was not mollified. Why are you even doing it? Is it a challenge? Do you have to break into his private files just to prove you're better than him?
No, she decided. I have to do it because it's something he doesn't want people to know about—doesn't want me to know about. It's worth something to him, and if I can crack it and copy it, then maybe I have a bargaining chip. Something that will help me make a deal to get out of here safely.
Also, I'm tired of being kept in the dark.
When the tea was ready and her hands were steadier she took the cup and returned to the chair and small table she had set up in one corner of the loft. She could hear people laughing on the street below, music blaring from cars. She reflected wistfully on how much nicer it would be if she had been born a sensible young woman, someone who would be out with friends on a Saturday night instead of sitting in a silent loft with black-out curtains on the windows, playing caretaker to a moody, v
iolent bastard like Dread.
She took a sip of tea and stared at her pad screen. Whatever password Dread was using had resisted every attempt. It was infuriating, almost unbelievable. A password? Even the most garbled collection of numbers and letters should eventually roll up as a combination on her random character generator, but for some reason it hadn't happened. And now that she had found a new bit of back-alley crypto gear to sniff out the shape of the password—nine characters—it was even more frustrating that she couldn't solve it.
In fact, it almost seemed impossible. Nine characters! It only took a short time for the gear to go through every possible combination of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks, but again and again it came up with nothing that would open the door to Dread's metaphorical locked room.
Remembering the lab tape and the strange, blurred experiment footage, she had also tried every variant on what she felt sure was his name, John Wulgaru. The gear should have generated the same things randomly as part of its algorithm, but she could not help feeling certain that the things he kept so scrupulously hidden, like his name and background, would have some connection to other things he wanted to keep secret from the world, for instance this bit of mysterious storage. But his name had not provided the key either, and before Dread had so unexpectedly and alarmingly interrupted her she had been inputting names from Aboriginal mythology, even though they too should already have been created by the near-infinite patience of the crypto gear.
Dulcie stared at the pad, then back at Dread's supine form, his dark Buddha face. It didn't make sense. Nine characters, but she had worked on it for hours without result. There was something she was missing—but what?
On a hunch, she went looking in her toolbox for a piece of gear she didn't often use, a strange little tangle of code even more esoteric than the one which had determined how many characters were in the password. A Malaysian hacker with whom she occasionally did business had traded it to her for a set of Asian bank personnel files she had downloaded while assisting a hostile takeover that ultimately failed. The would-be corporate pirates had been jailed in Singapore, and one of them had even been executed. Dulcie had made sure she would never be connected with the incident, but she hadn't been paid either, so she had been happy to unload the files anonymously and get something for them.