Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  He stared at the lighter in fury. What use was the damned thing? A communicator that didn't communicate, full of ghost-voices.

  But Dulcie Anwin had said it was something else as well. What had she called it? A V-fector. Something that would transmit not just voices, but . . . positional data.

  Dread smiled.

  He reopened the network's master records. The line was hot, so someone must be using it, even if the transmission itself was corrupted. He quickly found the positional information, but both sides of the current call seemed to have no origination point. Dread fought another flare of rage. Of course, if they were somehow inside the system itself there would be no conventional effector information. But this fairy-tale world had to be somewhere in the no-space of the network; just as he had chased the operating system through its interstices, he would chase the communication link until he found one end or the other.

  He reached for it now, feeling with his mind, his twist coming to life like a white-hot filament. The open communication channel was a silver wire, trembling, delicate. He would run down it and find them all. He would find the system and he would hurt it until the barrier fell, and then he would take the others and they would be his, utterly his, until their last gasping breaths.

  "I think I can . . . feel !Xabbu," Martine gasped. Sam was terrified by her anguished, death mask grimace. "But he's a million kilometers away—a billion! On the other side of the universe! It is too . . . too far."

  Martine Desroubins staggered to her feet, clutching her head. Paul Jonas reached out to steady her but she pulled away with a violent shake.

  "Do not. . . !" she begged him. "So difficult . . . so difficult . . . to hear. . . ."

  "You must hold the connection open," Sellars said through the boy Cho-Cho. "I am not ready."

  "Cannot. . . ." Martine bent at the waist, fingers squeezing her own skull as though she feared it would come apart. "Something terrible . . . ah! Ahhh! The Other! He is in . . . such pain!" Then her knees buckled and she fell forward onto her face.

  Paul Jonas ran to her side. When he lifted her up she sagged bonelessly.

  "Ready or not." It was Dread, whispering right inside Sam's head. "Here I come!" She cried out in fear.

  The others had clearly heard him, too: in his shock, Paul nearly dropped Martine back to the ground. Then reality lurched and stuck in gear again. It lasted only a moment, but when the world around Sam shuddered back into life things were not the same.

  It's so cold. . . ! The room-temperature universe had fallen into a deep winter chill. Something else came with the cold, a squeeze of terror that made it hard for her to breathe. She heard several of her companions cry out but she kept her eyes tight shut, every childhood instinct telling her to pull the blanket over her head and stay hidden until the nightmare went away.

  But there was no blanket.

  "Oh, Christ—it's gone!" Paul said. Sam could barely hear his voice over the rising sounds of terror from the fairy-tale folk scattered along the edge of the Well. Strong fingers curled around her arm and she cried out.

  "Get up, Sam," said Orlando. "It's happening."

  She opened her eyes. Orlando's Thargor body seemed different, wrong somehow, and it was more than just the strange light. He looked strangely incomplete, as though the top level of reality had been peeled away, leaving only its preliminary designs.

  "It's really dying," he said, and she could hear the terror just beneath his words. "The whole thing's dying. Look at us."

  Sam stared down at her own familiar tan arm, purple-gray in the pit's dimly smoldering light, now unreal as everything else. The path, the rock walls, her companions, all had lost some vital thing that had made them realistic, had slid back into a more basic state just as the black mountain had devolved beneath her feet during the long climb.

  We're not people, she thought, looking at the smooth planes of Paul Jonas' face, at Orlando's stiff musculature. We're really puppets.

  She struggled onto her feet, trying to fight back against the pressing fear. No, it's the operating system, the Other, not us. It's losing its grip. It's losing the dream. . . .

  "Oh, this is so impacted," Orlando breathed. He held up his sword, not to challenge, but to block out an unwanted sight.

  The barrier was dissolving.

  At the edge of the encampment the net of iridescent cloud that had covered them was becoming raw mist again, shifting, dispersing. The refugees, who like everything else had lost some critical degree of definition, ran from it like misprogrammed robots, tripping and scrambling and shouting in childish terror. A dark form appeared out of the thinning fog, striding toward the Well as the remains of the barrier swirled around it like cobwebs. Fairy-tale folk caught too close to the disintegrating curtain flung themselves out of the shadow-figure's path and fell on their stomachs, rubbing their faces against the ground in helpless panic. The thing ignored them, walking through the cleared space like some horrible null-light Moses crossing the Red Sea. Fear held Sam pinned in place. Orlando swayed beside her and his sword dropped out of his hand into the dust.

  "Now we finish," the thing said, and the terrible, gleeful voice in Sam's head made her want to smash her skull against something until she couldn't hear it anymore. "The end. Fade out. Roll credits."

  "The Well!" Florimel wailed. Her voice seemed to come from half a world away. "It's sinking!"

  Sam turned and saw that even the diminished light which had filled the Well was draining away into the heart of the world, emptying the great hole and pulling the empty black sky down on top of them like a rotting blanket. Now the only light in the world seemed to come from the eyes and grinning teeth of their enemy.

  "Into the Well!" someone screamed behind her—Paul, Nandi, she could not tell. "It's the only place left to hide! Down into the Well!" But Sam could not tear her eyes. away from the walking darkness.

  It's coming now.

  The thing under the bed . . . the noise in the closet . . . the smiling stranger pulling up along the curb as you walk home from school. . . .

  Orlando's hard hand closed on hers and jerked her to her feet. He pulled her toward the spot where Martine Desroubins had fallen onto her hands and knees at the edge of the pit. Most of their other companions were already scrambling down into darkness along some path Sam could not yet see. The blind woman looked as though she were shouting in pain. Orlando and Paul Jonas grabbed her and lifted her.

  "Where are you?" Dread's voice whispered, flicking soft as a snake's tongue in Sam's ear, "You can't hide from me. I know you all too well."

  She followed Orlando and Paul onto a ledge that ran crookedly along the inner wall of the empty pit. The two of them moved swiftly, even with Martine dangling between them. As she hurried after them Sam tripped on something and fell. By the time she clambered back onto her feet they had disappeared into the shadows below. Panicked, Sam looked back, sure that the thing with the ice-cold voice must be right behind her, and saw what she had stumbled over—a human foot. The boy Cho-Cho was lying at the side of the path, almost invisible in the deepening darkness. With her insides churned to sick horror at the thought of what must be right behind her, she only wanted to run after the others.

  No, he's just a micro! I can't leave him for . . . that.

  She turned against the shrieking of her own nerves and fought her way back up the slope. Cho-Cho seemed asleep, unaware of the deathly thing that was hunting them. She pulled him up into her arms, surprised and staggered by the limp weight.

  "What is happening?" Sellars' phantom voice sighed from the boy's open mouth. "Who are you?"

  "Everything—everything's happening! It's me, Fredericks!" She tripped again and almost went down.

  "Where is Martine?"

  "Just . . . shut up," Sam grunted. She fought her way down the path, struggling to keep herself upright. The walls of the pit were quickly losing the last of what had made them real; they glowed now with a strange dim light, a duller version of the liquid stars. She
thought she could make out the inconstant silhouettes of Orlando and Paul just a few meters ahead on the long downward spiral.

  Upside down—!Xabbu, was right! Her thoughts flitted like smoke-maddened wasps. It's the mountain turned upside down. . . !

  She could see nothing behind her yet but the pictures in her head were vivid enough—the empty-eyed shadow that was Dread swollen in her mind to giant size, sifting through the shrieking refugees with immense, shadowy fingers, picking them up in handfuls, examining them, then flinging them down in crackboned heaps.

  Looking for us, Sam thought. For us! He'll be coming down that path any second. . . . The horror of it made her so dizzy and scared that when she came around a bend into a wider part of the path and ran into Paul Jonas from behind, she almost blacked out.

  "Sam?" he said, nearly as startled as she.

  Martine was lying in the middle of the path where they had set her down, curled in a fetal ball. Orlando stepped around her to grab Sam's arm, then held it as though he didn't plan to let go. "Oh, jeez. . . ." He glanced at the limp form of Cho-Cho as if he didn't quite see it. "Frigging hell, Frederico, I didn't know where you were!"

  "I . . . had to go back," she gasped. "It's the little boy—I mean, it's Sellars. . . ."

  "I cannot stay involved with this." Sellers' fretful voice beside her ear startled her again. "There is too much to do. Tell Martine to keep the connection open at all costs. I will return."

  "Don't go," Paul said. "That thing . . . Dread . . . he's right behind us."

  "I can't do anything more here," Sellars said urgently. "I am sorry, but I still have my side of this to complete. Whatever else happens, Martine must not lose her connection to the heart of the system. She must hold on at all costs!"

  "Damn you, Sellars, don't you dare. . . !" Paul began, then Sam lurched against him and almost fell off the narrow path as the small body draped across her shoulder suddenly began to thrash in panic.

  "Put me down!" Cho-Cho screamed. He got a hand loose and grabbed at her face, making Sam stumble again. For a moment she felt nothing under her left foot, then found the edge of the path with her heel. She swayed, trying desperately to regain her balance.

  "Let me go!" The boy's elbow hit her in the side of the head so hard that her knees went rubbery and she slipped sideways. The boy's weight vanished from her shoulders.

  I dropped him, she thought, and then she too seemed to be tumbling into space until a powerful grip curled in the back of her shirt and yanked her back to the center of the ledge.

  A flare of light from deep in the Well painted dim streaks of silver and blue up the side of Orlando's barbarian form. He held the still-struggling Cho-Cho clasped against his naked chest. "Are you scanned beyond belief?" he barked at the boy, then snapped his chin down hard on top of his head. Unconscious or just educated, Cho-Cho stopped thrashing and hung motionless in the crook of Orlando's muscled arm.

  "You're all down there in the hole, aren't you?" It was Dread again, amused and annoyed, his words crawling through her skull like a trail of ants. Orlando was hearing it too: he grimaced in pain and disgust. "Do you really want me to come get you? Haven't you already played enough games?"

  Paul Jonas had dropped to Martine's side and was trying to lift her again.

  Orlando gave Sam's arm another squeeze. "Now, I might be imagining things, Frederico." His heroic imitation of a casual tone could not hide the tremor in his voice. His hand was probably shaking too, but Sam was shivering so badly herself she couldn't tell. "But our friend, Count Dreadula—is he some kind of Australian?"

  Catur Ramsey burst through the door into the adjoining room in time to hear the last of Sellars' words. The old man sounded worse than ever, weak and faint, as though he were talking through a garden hose from the other end of the galaxy.

  ". . . I have no time to explain it all again," he said. "There are minutes only."

  Kaylene Sorensen stood splay-footed in front of Christabel, fists curled, treating the faltering, disembodied voice from the wallscreen like a physical threat to her daughter. "You must be crazy! Mike, am I the only person here who hasn't lost her mind?"

  "I have no other useful options, Mrs. Sorensen." Sellars sounded weary to the point of collapse.

  "Well, I do." She turned to her husband. "I told you, it was bad enough that a . . . fantasy like this should drag us all out of our house, make us run for our lives like criminals. But if you think I'm going to let anyone get Christabel involved again in this . . . this . . . fairy tale. . . !"

  "It's all true, Mrs. Sorensen," Ramsey interrupted. "I wish it wasn't. But. . . ."

  "Ramsey, what are you doing here?" said Sellars with surprising strength. "You were supposed to stay on the line with Olga Pirofsky."

  "She doesn't want to talk to me. She said to tell you to hurry up—she's waiting for her son." It had been far stranger than that, of course. The Olga he had spoken to was nothing like the woman he had befriended, detached and frighteningly distant, as though Sellars had somehow connected him to an entirely different person. She had not acknowledged any of his words of pity and commiseration, had not even quite seemed to understand them. Like Sellars himself, she seemed to have receded across interstellar gulfs.

  "We have one chance," Sellars said. "If I cannot reach the operating system, all is lost. But even now, with the lives of so many in the balance, I cannot force you."

  "No," Christabel's mother said angrily. "You can't. And you won't."

  "Kaylene. . . ." Major Sorensen sounded miserable, both angry and helpless. "If no harm can come to Christabel. . . ."

  "He never said that!" his wife snapped. "Look at that little boy in the other room—he was under this man's protection, too. Is that what you want for your daughter?"

  Sellars spoke like a man climbing a mountain whose summit he already knew he did not have the strength to reach. "No, there aren't any guarantees. But Cho-Cho is different. He is connected directly into the system through his neurocannula. Christabel cannot make that kind of connection."

  Ramsey felt like a traitor, but he had to say it. "How about the others who are stuck in the system—some of them didn't have direct neural links. Neither did a lot of the Tandagore children."

  "You see!" said Kaylene Sorensen in fury and triumph.

  "Different," Sellars said wearily, his voice barely audible. "At least I think so. Operating system . . . Olga's son . . . dying now. Can't close . . . feedback loop."

  Because the Sorensens were facing the wallscreen, only Catur Ramsey saw Christabel slide off the bed, her bare feet stretching to touch the floor. So small, he thought. She looked frightened and very, very young.

  Good God, Ramsey thought. What are we doing to these people?

  The little girl turned and walked silently into the bedroom and closed the door.

  It's too much for her—too much. It would be too much for anyone.

  "I can't . . . I can't disagree with my wife," Major Sorensen was saying.

  "What does that mean?" Mrs. Sorensen snapped. Neither she nor her husband had taken much notice of Christabel's departure.

  "Lay off, honey," Sorensen said. "I agree with you. I just feel like shit about it."

  "Then there is nothing more to be said," Sellars declared in a dying man's voice. Incongruously, the wallscreen from which he spoke displayed the hotel's in-house node, footage of smiling people enjoying various New Orleans restaurants and tourist parks. "I will do what I can with what I have."

  Ramsey did not need visuals to know Sellars had disconnected. The Sorensens stared at each other, oblivious to him or anything else. Ramsey stood awkwardly in the doorway; with Sellars' departure he had changed from participant to voyeur in an instant.

  "I have to go," he said. Neither of the Sorensens looked at him.

  On the other side of the connecting door he leaned against the wall for a moment, wondering what had just happened and what it actually meant. Could Sellars really do nothing without the help of a girl scarce
ly out of kindergarten? And if he failed, what did that mean? Things had been happening so quickly that Ramsey was finding it hard to keep up. Just in the last two hours he had committed several major felonies—emptying an office building with a smoke bomb, interfering with the alarm systems for an entire island, putting a data tap on one of the world's biggest corporations. Not to mention the even more bizarre things that had come to light, the abandoned house and forest on top of the skyscraper, the tomblike pod room, the incomprehensible news about Olga's lost child being the operating system for the Grail network.

  Olga, he thought. Damn, I have to get back to Olga.

  The door to the Sorensens' rooms banged open and almost hit him. Michael Sorensen's face was pale, almost gray.

  "It's Christabel." The major's voice, his stunned expression, made Ramsey feel like he wanted to be sick.

  Kaylene Sorensen was cradling her daughter on the bed, calling her name urgently, as though the child were half a block away. The girl's ragdoll limbs and the eyes rolled upward until only the white showed told the story, or most of it. A pair of thick black sunglasses lay on the bedcover near Christabel's legs.

  "He did this!" Mrs. Sorensen said to Ramsey, a hiss of raw fury. "That monster—he pretended to ask our permission. . . ."

  "I'll call a doctor," her husband said, then turned to Ramsey, his face so strange and confused that Ramsey felt nauseated again. "Should I call a doctor?"

  "Wait. Just . . . don't do anything. Wait!" Ramsey started back toward his room, then realized that he could call from the wallscreen here and not risk disconnecting from Olga. He barked out the number, praying he had remembered it correctly. "Sellars! Answer me now!"