Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "What is it?" Ramsey asked. "I can't make it out."

  "I think it was a stream," she said. "It's mud now. Almost completely dry." The viewpoint moved closer until Ramsey could see that the white streaks were arranged in familiar shapes.

  "Are those fish?"

  "They were."

  Her tone was conversational, but Ramsey heard something in it he didn't like—something close to despair. "Come down, Olga. I've got Beezle in my other ear telling me they're almost done evacuating the building. We probably only have minutes to get you out."

  "I see something." A moment later the camera swung up. Ramsey could see it too, now. It was an even stranger sight on the top floor of a skyscraper than the dead trees and fish skeletons,

  "A house? A house?"

  "I'm going to go look."

  "I wish you wouldn't." Ramsey opened his other line. "I can't get her to leave yet, Beezle. How much time do we have?"

  "You're asking me? Sellars set it up so this whole thing would be screwed up on purpose—misleading alarms, rerouted communications, you name it. There's even some kind of reactor alert going out. The army could be there in five minutes or no one may come near the place for days."

  "Reactor alert? There's a reactor? Jesus. Just keep letting me know what's happening, will you?"

  Beezle snorted. "When I know anything, you'll know it too."

  The view on Ramsey's pad screen was too vertiginous to watch just now: Olga's hand was swinging up and down as she pushed her way through the overgrown vegetation. He closed his eyes. "How big is that forest?" he asked her. "Can you see anything else? What's over your head?"

  "Nothing. Just a big white ceiling at least fifty meters up." The picture settled as she towered the ring to show him the house, much larger now. "Can you see it?"

  "You can't just walk in, Olga. What if someone's in there?"

  "You obviously can't see it very well," she said, but didn't explain. Ramsey found himself holding his breath as she made her way across the ragged brown remains of what might once have been a large and very nice garden.

  "It is not too American-looking, this house," Olga said. "It looks like a European manor house—a small one. I saw many like it when I was younger."

  "Just be careful."

  "You worry too much, Mr. Ramsey. No one has lived here for some time, I think." The viewpoint swung forward as she reached for the door. "But who did live here? That is the question."

  The door creaked open. Ramsey heard it clearly enough down her channel to know that the silence that followed it was just as real. "Olga? Are you okay?"

  "It is . . . quite empty." She moved out of what seemed a narrow hallway and gave him a slow, sweeping view of the front room. The windows were shuttered, the room dark. Ramsey adjusted the brightness and resolution on his picture but still could make out little beyond the broad shapes of antique furnishings.

  "I can't see much. What's there?"

  "Dust," she said distantly. "There is dust on everything. The furniture, it seems quite old. Like something from two or three centuries ago. The carpet is dusty too, but I see no footprints. No one has been here in a long, long time." There was a long pause. "I do not like it here. I do not like the feeling."

  "Then get out, Olga. Please. I already told you. . . ."

  "I wonder who lived here? The man Felix Jongleur? But what trouble, to build something like this on top of his building when he could have had a real New Orleans mansion on the ground, with real gardens, real orchards. . . ."

  "He's rich and probably crazy, Olga. That combination produces a lot of odd things."

  "Whoever lived here, it was a sad place." The viewpoint moved along the wall, past a tabletop full of framed pictures; Ramsey saw grim faces in high collars. "A haunted house. . . ."

  "Time to go, Olga."

  "I think you are right. I do not like it here. But I will look into some of the rooms first."

  Ramsey held his tongue, but barely. He had no control over her, only the ability to suggest—it wouldn't do any good to give her an ultimatum he couldn't back up. Still, her weird, unhurried mood was making him very tense.

  "Dining room—look, there is still a table setting. Just one. As if someone simply did not come home for their meal." The viewpoint wandered across dusty plates and silver. The glassware was furred with cobwebs. "It is like Pompeii. Have you ever been there, Mr. Ramsey?"

  "No."

  "A strange place, Even the most ordinary things become magical in the right situations."

  She wandered through a few more rooms. When she found what was clearly a girl's bedroom with its shelf of cobwebbed but wide-eyed dolls, she broke her long silence. "Now I will leave. It is too pitiful, whatever this was."

  Ramsey did not say anything, not wanting to interfere with her resolution. He stayed quiet as she made her way back outside and into the barren garden.

  "Olga. . . ?" he finally said as she lingered in front of a dry stone fountain.

  "The children—they are not on this floor." She sighed. "There is nothing in that place, nothing left."

  "I know. . . ."

  "So there is one more place I must look," she said.

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  "There is a floor between this one and the room with all the machines," she said. "I will look there, too."

  "Olga, you don't have time. . . !"

  "I have nothing but time, Mr. Ramsey. Catur. All my life has come to this—this place, this moment." Even through the dreamy tone her voice was firm. "I have time."

  "I seem to have forgotten the way to the elevator," she said at last. She had not bothered to lift the ring for many minutes; Ramsey's only view was of the camera swinging back and forth over the ground, across the leaves and the humped, desiccated roots and parched ground.

  "Beezle," he said on the other line, "which way should she go?"

  "Jeez, I don't know," the agent rasped. "I don't have the maps for this floor. But the wall's circular and there's probably a walkway all around the outside, like there was just outside the elevator. Just tell her to keep going straight. She'll hit it sooner or later."

  "Sooner or later?" Ramsey closed his eyes again and took a deep breath. "Good God, am I the only person who's in a hurry around here?" But he relayed the message to Olga.

  Beezle was right. Within a few hundred paces she stepped onto a floor of polished wood and found the wall at the end of the dead forest. "Which direction?" she asked.

  "Beezle says take your pick."

  She turned right, following the featureless curve. After a moment, she slowed, then stopped. Maddeningly, Ramsey could still only see her feet.

  "What is it?"

  The viewpoint swung up. A vast square of darkly transparent plastic had been set into the wall. Through it he could just make out a dim suggestion of the roofs of buildings far below and for a moment he thought it was only another window, but the crudeness of the way adhesive foam had been splashed around its edges suggested it was a late and rather cursory repair to the now-decayed but careful work elsewhere on the floor,

  "I can . . . can feel them."

  It took him a moment to understand her. "The . . . the voices? You can feel them?"

  "Faintly." He heard her laugh a little. "I know, you are now finally convinced of what I have tried to tell you so long. I am mad. But I can feel them, just a little." She was silent for a moment. "Not good. It is another sad place—different from inside the house, even worse. Not good."

  She began moving again. "But whatever happened there, it is not what brought me here," she added. Ramsey was chilled by her casual tone, her certainty.

  "But . . . you felt them?"

  "I felt ghosts, Mr. Ramsey."

  She found the elevator and summoned it with her badge. When she had stepped in and the door had shut behind her, Ramsey moved to his other line.

  "She's taking forever, Beezle—she's going to the next floor down to look there, too. How are we doing? Firefight
ers show up yet?" The agent did not reply. "Beezle?"

  "I had to cut in and I'm afraid I've lost him," said a voice that was definitely not Beezle. "Things are a bit . . . difficult at the moment."

  "Sellars?"

  "Barely, but yes."

  It was unquestionably his voice but there was something eerie about it, a jittering tension beneath the calm. Ramsey thought he sounded like a man holding the live ends of a fifty thousand volt electrical cable. "Jesus, what's going on?"

  "It's a long story. I see Olga is still in the tower. . . ."

  "Yes, and I can't get her to leave. We've tricked up all the alarms, all the stuff you set up, but the authorities are probably going to be breaking in the doors any moment now and I keep telling her to get out, but she won't listen—she's still wandering around looking for the children, you know, the voices in her head. . . ."

  "Mr. Ramsey," Sellars interrupted, "at this moment I am already swimming in information—no, drowning. I am surrounded by data, more data than you can imagine. Every nerve in my body is about to catch fire and burn to carbon." Sellars took a shaky breath. "So will you do me a favor and shut the hell up?"

  "Sure. Sure, yes."

  "Good. I have to talk to Olga. While I'm doing that, I need you to go next door and talk to the Sorensens. If I have time, I'll join you and speak to them myself. This is critically important. If they're not there you have to find them immediately."

  "Got it."

  "And when I get done with Olga, I want you on the other line with her."

  "Me? But. . . ?"

  In remarkably few words, Sellars explained what he had discovered and was shortly going to tell Olga Pirofsky. Ramsey felt as though he had been kicked in the gut by a horse.

  ". . . So perhaps now you can understand why I want you with her when I've finished," Sellars said a bit harshly. He was maintaining his calm, but clearly at a price.

  "Christ." Ramsey looked at the screen, barely able to focus. "Oh, Christ. Oh, God." Olga's feet were still in view, stepping out of the elevator and onto a carpeted floor. "She's . . . she's just getting out."

  "I know," said Sellars, a little more gently now. "Go and talk to the Sorensens, will you, please?" And then he was gone.

  "Who the hell was that?" demanded Beezle. "Sucker cut me right off, booted me off the line."

  "I can't talk now," Ramsey told the agent. "Oh, my God, I can't believe this. Just stay on the line. I'll be back."

  "Jeez," said Beezle. "This'll teach me to quit working with meat."

  "So is there nothing left we can do?" Florimel asked angrily. "Again we must wait?"

  "Unless we can discover some way out," said Martine, "we have little choice."

  Orlando sat up and stretched his long arms, then tested the point of his sword with his fingertip. It was an old, familiar Thargor gesture, and it distracted Sam just as she was trying to remember something important. For a moment she could almost believe they were back in the Middle Country, in a world where games had rules. Thargor was here. Didn't that mean they would win? Thargor always won,

  But there is no Thargor, she thought sadly, not really. There's just Orlando and he already got killed once. She looked to the unreal gray wall of cloud. And even if we can't see him at the moment, that guy Dread is still out there. Sam felt like a mouse caught away from its hole, being stalked by an unhurried cat.

  I'm really going to die, she thought. It hadn't quite hit her before—there had always been hope, or at least distraction. Now nothing remained between her and nothingness but the last defenses of the dying system. I'm never going to see Mom or Dad again. My school. Even my stupid room . . .

  "What about this child?" asked Nandi Paradivash. "You said he was the emissary of the man Sellars."

  "Ain't no messary, vato," snarled the little boy Cho-Cho, who was sitting so far away from the others that the nearest person to him was the unsocial Felix Jongleur. "He never touch me—I cut anyone who try that. Me, I'm just helping him out."

  "That's what it means, boy," said Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "An emissary's a helper. Someone who carries messages."

  "But what message?" Florimel had calmed a little since the Twins had been dispatched but she was still edgy, her anger barely controlled. Looking around at the wreckage left by the Twins' attack, hundreds of miserable survivors still huddled around the edge of the Well and too many victims still lying where they had fallen, Sam couldn't really blame her. Any of the cowering fairy-tale folk could be Florimel's daughter or Renie's brother, but random questioning had confirmed that none of them seemed to remember a prior life. "What message?" Florimel repeated. "We know nothing. We continue in absolute ignorance as we have since the beginning!"

  "Has Sellars said anything to you?" Martine asked the little boy. "Can you hear him at all?"

  "Not since that dog-head mamalocker pulled the roof off that place," Cho-Cho said sullenly. "He just ditched me, like."

  "So it seems we won't get much from Sellars." Paul said wearily. "What next?"

  Felix Jongleur pierced the uncomfortable silence. "It is a miracle you have all stayed alive so long. Democracy is a frightening thing, seen up close."

  "Shut up," Florimel snapped. "You pig-dog, you want to see the frightening side of democracy? Remember, there are a lot of us and then there is just you."

  "The idea was that he would be useful," said Paul slowly. Sam had never seen him looking so cold and angry. "Well, it's about time he was. It may be too late to do us much good, but I'd still like some answers. About the operating system—about the whole thing. . . ."

  Several of the others seemed to agree: an increasingly unhappy murmur rose around the campfire. They all turned to look at Jongleur, who accepted their attention with his usual flat, forbidding gaze, but Sam thought she saw something else just beneath, something peculiar. Was he ashamed? Frightened? He seemed almost . . . nervous.

  "Come, friend," Azador called from his seat next to Martine. "These people have questions. Put their minds at rest."

  Paul turned on the Gypsy. "And you, Azador—what is your problem? Do you know who your so-called friend really is? That's Felix Jongleur, the man who ran the Grail Brotherhood. Remember the bastards you went on and on about, the ones who chased you and imprisoned all your people, who used them to make their machines work? That's the head of it all—that man, right there."

  Sam held her breath, wondering if Azador would now attack Jongleur as Paul had earlier. It was a miracle, really, that the secret she and !Xabbu had agreed to keep should have lasted so long. . . .

  "!Xabbu!" she said out loud, suddenly remembering.

  Azador was not listening. He peered intently at Jongleur, then at Paul Jonas. Finally he shrugged, oddly embarrassed. "It seems a long, long time ago."

  "What?" Paul was almost screaming. "Good Lord, this man has been killing your people but you're just going to let bygones be bygones because you're you're . . . bloody chums now? How can you?"

  "Because it never happened," Jongleur said scornfully. "These are his people, what is left of them." He waved his hand to indicate the wreckage of the wagons, the remaining Gypsy men and women huddled around their fires. "Everything else was fantasy."

  "!Xabbu!" Sam said, louder this time. "Everybody, I utterly forgot about !Xabbu because of those monsters, and Orlando, and . . . and everything. He went into that pit—he dived in! I went in after him but it spit me out and I couldn't get him. He thought Renie was down there!"

  This set the circle around the campfire buzzing.

  "Then he is gone, Sam," Florimel said at last. There was something softer and sadder in her tone now.

  "Orlando came back from there!" Sam said angrily.

  "That is different, Sam," Martine told her. "You know that it is."

  Because he isn't alive like !Xabbu, Sam thought but didn't say. That's what she means. Deep down, much as she hated it, she knew Martine was right. Several of her companions were all talking at once now. Because Orlando didn't come back fro
m there, he was . . . born from there.

  "There is an easy way to find out if she is there," said Jongleur loudly. A sour smile played around the edge of his mouth. "But I am sure you have thought of it already and need no assistance from a monster like me."

  "Don't push your luck," Martine warned him. "If you have something useful to say, do so."

  "Very well. Do you still have your communication device? I was with the woman Renie when you called her before. Why not call her again?"

  "My God," Martine said. "My God, with everything going on I had completely forgotten." She pulled a chunky silver lighter from the pocket of her coveralls.

  "How did you get that?" Sam asked, completely confused. "Renie had it!"

  "It is a copy," Martine told her. "I will explain later."

  Sam saw the glint of satisfaction—or perhaps something else—in the hawk-faced man's eyes. She jumped to her feet and pointed at Jongleur. "Don't let him get near it!"

  He spread his hands. "I am on the other side of the fire. There are, as you pointed out, many of you and only one of me."

  Martine lifted the lighter. "Renie," she said, "can you hear me? It's Martine. Renie, are you there?"

  For long moments, there was nothing.

  "Can you hear me, Renie?"

  Then suddenly her familiar voice was in their midst, as close and clear as if she had joined them at the campfire. "Martine? Martine, is that you?"

  Martine laughed with delight. "Renie! Oh, what a blessing to hear you. Where are you?"

  "I'm . . . I don't really know. Inside the operating system, I guess. But that's only the beginning of how bizarre this all is. !Xabbu is with me. . . ."

  "!Xabbu!" Sam found herself crying again. "He's alive!"