by Tad Williams
"What are you talking about?" Joseph squinted at him. "She didn't want no family. She wanted to study all that university foolishness."
"She had a child, or just as good as. I didn't want to be a father."
"Child?" Joseph rose higher in his seat. "What are you talking about? My Renie didn't have no child!" But a panicky voice inside him asked, Did you miss that, too? How much went past after her mama died, while you were trying to drink yourself to sleep every day?
"You ought to know," Del Ray said. "I'm talking about your son, Stephen. Renie's brother."
"What foolishness is this?"
"Renie might as well be his mother is what I'm saying. You weren't there most of the time. She raised him just like he was her own child. That's what I wasn't ready for, I suppose—having a little boy of my own while I was still just a boy myself. It scared me."
Joseph let himself relax. "Oh, Stephen. You just talking about Stephen."
"Yes." Del Ray's voice was full of sarcasm. "Just Stephen."
Joseph watched the hills slide past, the suburbs of Durban as strange to him as another continent, full of lives he could only imagine. It was true, Renie had tried to step in when Stephen's mother had died. Well, that was a woman's nature, wasn't it? It wasn't Joseph's fault. He had to earn a living, make sure they both had food to eat. And when he couldn't work anymore—well, that wasn't his fault either, was it?
A vision of Stephen in his hospital bed, the blurred shape beneath the plastic tent, made Joseph flinch. He leaned forward to fiddle meaninglessly with the music controls. He did not want to believe it was the same Stephen as the little boy who had climbed up the tree in Port Elizabeth that one time and then refused to come down until he found a monkey nest. It was easier to think of them as two separate people—the real Stephen and the terrible fraud in the bed, curled up like a dead insect.
When his wife Miriam had been lying in the burn ward, the light slowly fading from her eyes, he had wished that there were some way he could go down after her, follow her into death and then carry her back out to the world again. He had thought he would do anything, risk anything, suffer any pain to find her and bring her back. But there was nothing he could do, and that had been a far worse pain than anything he could have imagined. Drink? If the ocean had been wine, he would have drunk it down from shore to shore to make the hurting stop.
But wasn't that what Renie was doing? Going after Stephen, no matter how little hope there was, trying to find him and bring him back from death?
For a moment, as they moved out from behind a truck to change lanes, the afternoon sun stabbed through the windshield into Joseph's eyes, dazzling him. To think that there was so much love in her, growing on sorrow like a green vine curling up out of the ruin of a dead tree. It was as though the terrible secret of how Joseph had felt while Renie's mother lay dying had jumped from him to his daughter without words. It was a mystery, a great and terrible mystery.
He was silent for a long time, and Del Ray seemed to like it that way. The music played on, lively, bouncing rhythms, something to chase away care. Durban vanished into the late-afternoon gloom behind them.
They waited only two minutes after Gilbert's ancient sedan had pulled away from the warehouse building before spilling out of the black van. The three men, two black, one white, moved quickly. One pushed a card into the front door slot, overriding the palm-reader. They filed silently up the stairs. It took them only a few moments to find the door of Elephant's rented space.
One of the black men slapped an adhesion-cup of shaped hammer gel onto the door just above the handle, then all three stepped back. The contained explosion shattered the bolt and fried the door's internal electronics, but they still had to slam against it two times before it popped open.
Elephant had a spike into the warehouse's security camera-drones, which had given him almost a minute's headstart, plenty of time to dump his system memory (the resident memory only, since he had backups scattered on various nodes under various coded designations) and replace it with a carefully-constructed and legally irreproachable substitute. When the three men smashed through the door he was sitting with his hands held up in plain sight, a look of injured innocence on his round face.
All of which would have been fine if the trio had been a UNComm flying squad, as Elephant had expected. But Klekker and Associates had a much different agenda than UNComm, and—unfortunately for Elephant—a very different modus operandi as well.
They had already crushed two of his fingers before he even had a chance to tell them how willing he was to share whatever information they wanted about his earlier guests. He could tell these men were not the types to bargain, so he did not try to make a deal, but admitted that the information Del Ray Chiume and his friend had wanted was available to anyone with the skills to find it. Maps of the Drakensberg and information about an abandoned military base called "Wasp's Nest" was all he had given Chiume and the old man. It had been dumped out with the system memory, but Elephant hurried to assure the new arrivals he would be happy to find it again.
Klekker and Associates had made one mistake already, assuming that an old woman named Susan Van Bleeck was not going to survive the attack on her house. She had, at least temporarily, and that was an error they would not make twice.
Two small-caliber bullet wounds in the back of the skull did not make for much bleeding, but the red puddle was still slowly growing on the desktop beneath Elephant's head when the three men had gathered up the last of the things they wanted. One of them paused at the doorway to toss a small dispersive incendiary back into the cluttered room, then they went down the stairs, moving swiftly but without obvious haste.
The van was half a kilometer away before the building's fire alarms went off.
CHAPTER 21
The Spire Forest
NETFEED/ART: Artistic Suicide Challenge
(visual: Bigger X at Toronto arraignment)
VO: A guerrilla artist known only as No-1 has challenged the better-known forced involvement artist Bigger X to a suicide competition. No-1's broadside against Bigger X, which calls him a "poseur" because "he only works with other people's deaths," suggests a suicide competition between the two artists, to be broadcast live by "artOWNartWONartNOW." The one with the most artistically interesting suicide would be judged the winner, even though he or she would not he around to collect the prize. Bigger X, who is wanted by the police for questioning in a Philadelphia bombing, has not been available for comment, but ZZZCrax of "artOWNartWONartNOW" called it "an intriguing story."
"We have a short time left before the sun rises," said Brother Factum Quintus. "Renie, Florimel—perhaps you would accompany me?" He gestured to the stairs.
Renie looked at T4b, busy comforting Emily, who had been stumbling like a sleepwalker since their encounter with the Lady of the Windows hours ago. The pair were seated on a dusty, threadbare couch which looked like it might collapse under the weight of T4b's armored form at any moment, but otherwise the small tower room seemed safe enough. "You two stay here, will you?"
"We will not go far from them," the monk reassured her. "It is only a small distance. But if we do not want ourselves revealed to watching eyes, we should go before the sun rises."
!Xabbu hesitated only a moment, then joined the small procession as they mounted the stairs; Renie knew he was restraining himself, since in his baboon form he could have climbed much faster.
"This tower is on the edge of what is called the Spire Forest," Factum Quintus said. "A very fascinating part of the House." He was breathing a little heavily, but otherwise had weathered being kidnapped by bandits and the unexpected appearance of a religious revelation far better than Renie and her supposedly more hardened comrades. The monk had an almost childlike quality of being interested in everything, even the dreadful and the dangerous—a good trait in many ways, but Renie could not help worrying about his safety.
Oh, Jesus Mercy, she reminded herself, he's a bloody Puppet. Might as well star
t fretting about the characters in netflicks, too.
But the idea of Factum Quintus as an artificial being—not even a living creature, but an amalgam of coded behaviors—was hard to hold on to when those coded behaviors were walking beside her, slightly flushed, murmuring to themselves in pleasure over a newel-post.
"Why does it matter whether it is sunrise or not?" Florimel asked.
"Because the place we are going has many windows—and so do the other places. You will see." The monk paused on the landing, about to say something more, when suddenly the entire universe shrugged as though trying to dislodge something crawling on its back.
Renie had time only to think, Oh, not again. . . ! before everything went sideways.
In an instant her surroundings blurred, retreating in all directions as though she were being shrunk to the size of an atom, but at the same time they seemed to topple in on her, as though reality itself were enfolding and crushing her. For half an instant, a terrible, jagged bolt of pain passed through her, as though her nerves were the teeth of a comb being dragged along a rough brick wall. Then the pain vanished, and so did everything else.
She had experienced these reality-quakes before, but never one that had gone on so long. She had been floating in darkness for a long time—she knew her time-sense must be distorted, but she had been able to think about many things while the darkness persisted.
I feel . . . different. Than the other times. Like I'm actually somewhere. But where?
She could feel her body, too, which was unusual. As far as she could remember, in the earlier episodes she had always been bodiless—a floating mind, a witness to a dream. But now she had the sense of her self, a knowledge that extended all the way to her fingers and toes.
What is that called, that sense-of-the-body? Had the word gone, like so much of her university vocabulary and other minutiae, swallowed up afterward in the day-to-day of grading exams and trying to stretch limited resources into legitimate lessons? No, it's . . . it's proprioception. That's the word.
A small warm glow suffused her, satisfaction at having remembered. But with it came an increasing sense of something wrong, something different. Proprioception was indeed the word, and her proprioceptive senses were sending her strange messages. She had been in the network so long that it took a while before she finally understood.
I feel like I have a body again. A real body. My body!
She moved her hands. They moved. Strange currents beat at them, strange pushes and pulls buffeted her, but she was feeling her own hands. She touched herself, running her hands over her arm, her breasts, her belly, and was startled by how dazzlingly ordinary her body felt. Her fingers slid up to her face and encountered tubes . . . and a mask.
It's me! The thought was so bizarre she could not quite grasp it for a moment. The confusion of real and unreal had become a normal way of thinking, hard to put aside on such short notice, but the facts seemed indisputable: she was touching her own naked body. The bubble-mask with its dependent tubes and wires was again clamped to her face. The thought of what it all meant was slower, but when it finally arrived, it had the force of epiphany.
I'm . . . I'm back!
The strange flow of forces across her skin must be the gel in the V-tank, temporarily offline from the reality-mimicking circuits of the Otherland network and generating random patterns. That meant . . . that meant she could simply pull the inside release handle on the tank and step out! After all these weeks, the real world was only inches away.
But what if it was temporary? Or what if the same thing was not happening to !Xabbu, and he would be left behind in the network? It was hard to think—the excitement of the world that had seemed so far away now being so near was making her claustrophobic. How could she float here, deep in the unlit depths of the tank, while real air and real light were only a few movements away? Even seeing her father, the miserable old bastard, would be such a joy. . . !
The thought of Long Joseph brought with it the memory of Stephen and her excitement suddenly turned cold and heavy. How could she leave when she had done nothing for him? She would be free, yes, but he would still be stretched like a corpse in that horrible tent, wasting away.
Adrenaline sped through her like a brushfire. Whatever she was going to do, she might have only minutes or even seconds before this ended. She pushed at the inconstant gel, forcing herself toward one of the sides of the tank. Her hands encountered something hard and unevenly smooth—the tank's interior wall and its millions of pressure-jets. She curled her fingers into a fist and tried to find an area where the counterpressure was weaker, then rapped at the wall. A dull sound like a gong wrapped in a blanket came back to her, so quiet that she despaired anyone would ever hear it until she remembered that she was wearing not just a mask but hearplugs. She knocked again, over and over, and the more she did so without result, the stronger grew the urge to throw aside all responsibilities and simply open the tank. Escape. Escape would be so wonderful. . . .
"H–hello?" It was very hesitant but very close.
"Jeremiah? Is that you?" His voice in her ear brought his face with it, a pure spark of memory, as though he had suddenly appeared in the darkness beside her. "Oh, God, Jeremiah?"
"Renie?" He sounded even more surprised than she was, his voice shaking. "I'll . . . I'll let you out. . . ."
"Don't open the tank! I can't explain, but I don't want the tank opened. I don't know how much time I have."
"What's. . . ." He stopped, clearly overwhelmed. "What's happening with you, Renie? We weren't able to talk to you after the first few minutes you went in. It's been weeks! We had no idea what. . . ."
"I know, I know. Just listen. I don't know if this will do you any good, but we're still in the network. It's huge, Jeremiah. It's . . . I can't even explain. But it's strange, too. We're still trying to understand everything." And yet they understood almost nothing—how could she possibly relate what they had experienced? And how would any of it be of any use? "I don't know what I can say. There's something keeping us online—this is the first time I've been off the network or whatever it is since we first hacked our way in. There are other people involved, too. Damn, how can I explain? Somebody just told us we're supposed to go to Priam's Walls, which I think is some kind of simulation of the Trojan War, but we don't know why, or who wants us to go, or . . . or anything. . . ." She took a breath, floating in darkness, separated from life by a thin wall of fibramic crammed with micromachinery. "Jesus Mercy, I haven't even asked about you, about my father! How are you? Is everything okay?"
Jeremiah hesitated. "Your father . . . your father is fine." There was a pause. Despite her racing heart, Renie almost smiled. Clearly, he was driving Jeremiah crazy. "But . . . but. . . ."
She felt a sour tug of fear. "But what?"
"The phone." He seemed to be struggling for words. "The phone here has been ringing."
Renie could make no sense of this. "So? It's old technology—that's what phones used to do."
"No, it's been ringing, and ringing, and ringing." A burst of static swept through her hearplugs, almost obliterating the last repetition. His words jumped back, very clear. "So I answered it."
"You did what? Why in the name of God did you do that?"
"Renie, don't yell at. . . ." Another blizzard of noise swept through. ". . . Until I was going crazy. I mean, after your. . . ." Jeremiah's pause was his own this time, although more distortion soon followed. "Anyway, I . . . up . . . other end . . . said. . . ."
"I can't hear you! Say that again."
". . . it was . . . me . . . frightened. . . ."
"Jeremiah!"
But his voice had grown distant, like a bee buzzing in a paper cup several meters away. Renie shouted to him again, but it was too late: the connection was gone. Within moments she felt her sense of her surroundings diminishing as well, as though something had reached down and grasped her mind in powerful yet velvet-soft fingers and was drawing it right out of her body. She had time only to wo
nder what would have happened if she had actually left the tank, then she was sucked back into the void again. Darkness lasted only another instant, then the world—the virtual world—reassembled itself around her in a fluttering explosion of particulate color, like a tumbled card-tower flocking back together, until the stairs were beneath her feet once more and Brother Factum Quintus' face was before her, lips still parted in preparation for speech.
"In fact. . . ." was all he had time to say before Renie astonished him by sagging and then collapsing onto the stairs.
"So Factum Quintus didn't feel anything," Renie said quietly. She had passed off her collapse as a dizzy spell, and the monk had already begun to mount the stairs again. "For him, it was like it didn't happen. He just turned off and then turned on again."
"That is no doubt because he is a Puppet," Florimel whispered—caught up as Renie was in the strange courtesy of not letting Factum Quintus suspect he might be artificial. "My experience was more like yours. Of all these . . . spasmic occurrences I have been through in this network, this was the strangest. I felt myself back in my own body. I . . . I felt my daughter beside me." She hesitated, then abruptly turned to follow the monk.
"What happened to me was different," !Xabbu said, padding along at Renie's side. "But I would like to think about it for a little while before I tell you."
Renie nodded. She was still too shaken by the brief moment of return to want to talk much at all. "I don't know that we can make any sense of it anyway. Something's happening—I can't believe it's normal when everything goes crazy like that. But what it all means. . . ."
Renie fell silent as they stepped up onto the landing, which turned out to be the entrance to the top of the tower. The room was only a few meters wide, an octagon with a window of thick, old-fashioned leaded panes in each wall. The sky outside was cobalt blue, but already at the edges night was beginning to burn away; a faint glow of dawn outlined the strange horizon.