by Tad Williams
"I tried to tell her these were problems we couldn't afford to consider at this point, that they were so far away from being real that we had to put our energy into other things, but she remained troubled. And so do I. I cannot help remembering the kindness of the flying people in Aerodromia before Dread murdered one of their tribe. There was an entire intricate world in that valley, and there are uncounted other worlds within this network.
"In any case, with much work !Xabbu, Renie, and I managed to solve some of the problems of using the access device, but were still unable to summon a gateway where no mechanism already existed, so on the third day we set out for the place we had first entered the House—the Festival Halls, as Factum Quintus called them. Even with Florimel much improved, it was more than a day's march, so we slept that night still in the upper stories, then continued down until we reached the level of the Festival Halls. Factum Quintus still had to descend several more floors to return home, so after drawing us a map that Renie said was so detailed it looked like an engraving, he left us. It was a strange, sad parting. I knew the monk only a little, and my feelings about this world will always be steeped in the horror of that tiny room, but he had clearly become a genuine friend to the others. They were all very, very sorry to see him go.
" 'I do not know what I have been involved in,' he said as we parted, 'but I know you are good people, and I am glad if I've helped. Yes, glad. I hope when your task is finished, you will return to us at the Library and tell us what you have seen and found. I shall save a chapter in my book just for your new discoveries!'
"Renie promised that we would return when we could, but it felt like a terrible lie told to spare a child's feelings. As we watched his tall, angular shape vanish down the corridor, I could sense she was crying. It is almost impossible not to agree with her—if Brother Factum Quintus was not a living being, then I must admit that I do not understand the meaning of the words. And the great House itself, though forever tainted for me, has a peculiar beauty. For its people, it is the world, and it is a world like no other.
"What have these Grail monsters created? Do they understand? Do they even care, or like the slave masters of old, are the lives of others so unimportant to them that they cannot conceive of anyone but themselves having dreams and desires?
"The departure of Factum Quintus brought up another and more surprising realization for me. The pain I felt as we watched him go was part of a larger and more confusing feeling. Far more frightening, in a way, than anything Dread made me feel about my own imminent death, as shattering as that experience was.
"I have friends now. And I am terrified of losing them.
"For so long, I have isolated myself—always keeping something back, even from my occasional lovers. Now I am connected. It is a painful, frightening feeling. A couple I once knew from my university days told me, when they had their first child, that they had given a hostage to Fate and would never be comfortable again. I understand now. It hurts to love. It hurts to care.
"There. Now I have made it hard to talk again. It is ridiculous. I am glad the others are asleep, and cannot see me.
"We reached the Festival Halls and the room where the gate was. The remnants of our first fire were still there, a circular scorch mark and a pile of ashes. It was strange to realize we had been there only days before, no more than a week. It felt like a year had passed.
"!Xabbu and Renie and I continued to work hard in the hours after returning to our entrance point, until we felt sure we had solved all the most crucial problems. We would not be able to manipulate the environment in the way one of the Grail Brotherhood might, but we could open up some of the access channels. It was not easy—we struggled, and we worked. . . .
"My God, I am tired, so tired. I cannot tell it all now. So much has happened, and all I want to do is sleep. We made the lighter work. We stepped into our newly-summoned gateway, leaving the gloomy magnificence of the House behind as we walked into the golden light and passed on to another place, just as we had hoped.
"But for the first time since we entered the network, we have . . . changed.
"No. This must wait. If I were writing this as the ancients did, with paper and ink, the pen would long since have dropped from my hand. We have changed. We are in a new land, the ceilings and dim lanterns of the House exchanged for endless night skies and stars that blaze, not twinkle.
"I do not fear for myself, not anymore, but I am more frightened than I can say for these dear, brave people who are my friends. We are few, and every day it seems we are fewer.
"I am so tired . . . and the others are calling me.
"Code Delphi. End here."
They were all around him in the darkness, although they were scarcely more solid than darkness themselves—the shadow-faces, the animal men, the hungry things, all the Dreamtime monstrosities, all shifting and changing as they moved closer.
But closest of all was her face, her face, grinning, cold, enjoying his misery. He was trapped in darkness with all the terrors that ever were, and she had put him there.
Death could not claim her. He could kill her a million times and she would still be there, still trying to fill him up with shadows, still trying to crush his heart.
The face shifted, but it remained the same. He struggled to put a name to it as the shadows drifted away, but names were meaningless. It was her. She had done this to him.
His whore mother.
That little Polly—another dream-raddled slut.
The faces rippled past, thousands of them, screaming, begging, but still beneath it all they were triumphant. They were all one. They could not die—she could not die.
As he swam up from the nightmare, the last face hovered before him, bloody and smirking.
Renie Sulaweyo. The bitch who killed me.
Dread sat up. The dream, if that was what it had been, still clung. He shuddered, rolled out of the chair and onto his knees, then was violently sick.
So that's what it feels like to die, he thought, resting his head against the cement. That's as bad as anything the Old Man's ever done to me.
After he had wiped the floor, then stumbled to the bathroom to wash out his mouth, he settled himself on the edge of the chair and stared at the white walls. The room, his new Sydney base of operations, was all but bare. The carpet was being installed later in the day. The coma couch was at the warehouse, waiting to be delivered. Dulcie Anwin would be arriving in a little over twenty-four hours. There were things to do.
He could not make himself move. Something was blinking at the edge of his vision, indicating a waiting message, but for the moment all he wanted to do was sit and let the rest of the dream fall away.
God damn the bitch. How had it happened? Had she stabbed him, or had she been hiding a gun all along? He shook his head and brought up a little music, a quiet course of Schubert lieder designed to soothe his aching head and singed nerves. He had forgotten the Old Man's mantra, that was what had happened—Confident, cocky, lazy, dead. A virtual death, but still quite a useful lesson. A stupid death. He had played with them the way he would have played with a single victim, the quarry for one of his hunts. He had underestimated them. He would not do so again.
The singer's silvery tones washed over him, relaxing him a little. This was a setback, but only a temporary one. He still had Dulcie's copy of the lighter, and a lot more information about everything than the Sulaweyo bitch and her friends. He would find them. He would cut them away from each other one by one and destroy them. He would save the African whore for last.
Yeah, it's a flick, he thought. He changed the Schubert to something more brutish and stirring, strings wallowing and drums rattling, the sound of something with a very small brain being killed by something faster and meaner. But they don't know that I'm writing the script. They don't know this is only the middle. And they're going to hate the ending.
It was time to get ready for Dulcie's arrival, time to start the most important phase of his plan. Dealing with that gang
of losers was only a sideshow, after all. He needed to remember that.
He brought up the message, extinguishing the annoying glimmer at the corner of his eyesight. Klekker appeared, huge and startlingly ugly. The South African operative had reputedly been rebuilt after surviving a near-fatal bombing—cellular restoration and almost complete skeletal replacement with fibramics, especially around the face and hands. Without having seen his original face, it was hard to tell whether the surgeons were geniuses or monstrous failures.
"The Sulaweyo woman and her companions are in an abandoned Air Force base up in the mountains outside Durban," Klekker's recorded image rasped. "We should be able to secure them in a matter of seventy-two hours or so, depending on the security they've got in place. I'll take four men and some specialty equipment, if you authorize."
Dread frowned. He didn't just want Renie Sulaweyo's meat, he wanted her soul. He wanted to hold her naked terror in his hands. On the other hand, having her body made for a potentially useful bargaining chip, and he was fairly sure that the little Bushman was with her, too, which might be an even greater pull on her loyalties than her own physical safety. Even Martine, sweet, terrified, blind Martine might be slumbering away beside them, if she had somehow survived his little parting gift.
He keyed Klekker's number in. When the man answered, his face swollen and emotionless as a thunderhead, Dread said, "You're authorized. But I want them alive, and I want the woman's body and the Bushman's body untouched. In fact, anyone who appears to be online, I want them left that way. Don't unplug them unless I tell you to."
Dread brought his internal music up louder as he clicked off. His good cheer was returning, the Dreamtime ghosts banished by daylight and activity. The hero had experienced a setback, but that's the way these stories always ran. Big things were going to start happening very soon now, and lot of people were going to be surprised.
Very, very surprised.
CHAPTER 24
Serious Games
NETFEED/NEWS: Jingle and Company Want Jixy Sixed
(visual: Uncle Jingle next to Captain Jixy and Alien Pals)
VO: Uncle Jingle, the venerable host of a world-famous children's interactive, has decided that it's time to put away the nice guy act. Obolos Entertainment, who own the trademarks for Uncle Jingle's Jungle and The Jingle Jungle Krew are bringing in heavyweight legal muscle to deal with the threat of what they call "blatant infringement" by the Scottish firm WeeWin. WeeWin has released a line of toys called "Captain Jixy's Crew, " which Obolos says are an obvious attempt to trade on the success of Uncle Jingle,
(visual: Obolos spokesperson holding Zoomer Zizz and Wee Win's Ztripey Ztripe)
VO: At a news conference today, Obolos demonstrated what they labeled "almost a perfect case-by-case duplication " of many of their most famous characters. . . .
The wine-dark seas. That was what Homer liked to call them, Paul remembered—one of the phrases, like "rosy-fingered Dawn," that came up again and again, to the delight of Classics instructors and the dread of bored schoolboys. It was a way to give form and shape to things, a way to help the bards remember as they passed along the old, strong words, generation after generation, before alphabets and books.
But they weren't just dark like wine, of course, these Homeric seas. As Paul sat on the raft through days of storm and sun, the sea proved itself even more changeable than the sky. There were moments it turned a blue so light and transparent it seemed to go ice-white at the edges; other times it grew as coldly opaque as stone. When the sun was low in the morning, it would sometimes bring the entire surface to dazzling fire, but then as it climbed overhead the sea might become a field of strangely mobile jade. When the great disk went down in the evening, burying itself in the tangerine clouds on the horizon, there would be a moment, an instant's flash, when the sea went black and the sky itself turned an unearthly green—the precursor to the appearance of the most splendid stars Paul had ever witnessed.
Despite his impatient longing for home and peace, there were moments as Paul watched heaven and its oceanic mirror reflecting and distorting each other that he felt something that could only be called joy—although it was a joy he kept to himself. Since their escape from Lotos, Azador had regained all his earlier reticence and more, retreating into an even more sullen silence, all spines, like a hedgehog curled into a ball. It was as much as Paul could do simply to get the man to confirm that they were indeed sailing slowly toward Troy.
There were worse places to be functionally alone; Paul found he did not mind the silence as much as he once had. Since the winged woman's last visitation, he found himself full of elusive thoughts and speculations. If his own memory still contained locked doors, there was no reason he could not try to guess what might lie behind those barriers, especially now that he finally had a few clues.
The first and greatest puzzle was of course the woman herself. Her brief appearance when he was clutching the spar of his broken boat, near drowning, had been different from her other visitations: all the other times she had come to him, in dreams or in the simulations themselves, she had been dressed in something appropriate to the setting. The early twentieth-century clothes she had worn for that one appearance, although antique, had not been particularly strange in themselves—he had seen her in many exotic guises—but they had had nothing at all to do with ancient Greece or the giant's castle of his dreams. The vision had sparked something in him. He wondered now whether he had seen something closer to her true self, or at least closer to his buried memories of her.
So who was she? Someone who knew him, obviously, unless she was simply part of the network and coded to behave as she did. But that did not explain why he felt so sure that he knew her, too. If he put aside the frankly chilling possibility that both of them had somehow been manipulated to remember a purely imaginary relationship—a consideration which opened speculations about his own reality Paul did not even want to touch—then it left one likely possibility: they did know each other, but it had been obliterated from his memory, and from hers as well. The obvious candidates for such tampering had to be the Grail Brotherhood. Nandi's explanations of their nature and plans had been confirmed by Azador in his lotos-trance, even if he was now resolutely refusing to discuss it further.
But that led Paul to an entirely different and unanswerable question. Why? Why would such powerful people care a jot about Robert Paul Jonas? Why, even if they did, would they keep him alive on their expensive system instead of simply pulling his plug? Did that mean that somehow his body was not in their possession? But why then on the occasions they had almost captured him hadn't they simply destroyed him? Surely in this virtual universe, where he had been warned that the dangers to him were real, the horrible Twins could simply have arranged to have a bomb dropped on him once they found him.
Clearly, there were no obvious answers.
Paul tried to summon up his last useful recollection, hoping that discovering where the obliteration of his memory began might give him some hint at what came after. Before his flight through the worlds of the network—before what he thought of as his starting place, the now-dim horrors of the First World War simulation—came . . . what? The memories before that point were from the routine of his daily life, the boring story he had lived for so long—walking out to Upper Street in the mornings, the quiet click of the electrical bus filled with English commuters busily ignoring each other, then the descent into gloriously-named Angel Station (which didn't quite live up to that, but what could?) and the morning tube ride down the wheezy Northern Line to Bankside. How many days had he started off in just that way? Thousands, probably. But how could he guess which had been the last one, the last clear stretch before the fields of recollection disappeared in silvery fog? His days had been so mundane, so similar that his friend Niles had used to tell him that he was hurrying toward middle age the way other people hurried to meet a lover or a long-lost friend.
Thinking of Niles brought with it a flash of something else, so
mething vague as a distant night sound. Niles' teasing had finally begun to sting. Shamed by his more cosmopolitan friend, Paul had begun to mourn his own not-so-distant past, the years of his youth when there had been more to look forward to than the yearly winter holiday in Greece or Italy. In his normal, ineffectual, well-that's-Paul-isn't-it style he even had begun to brood about it, secretly knowing that nothing more exciting would come of this urge to break out than a short, disastrous love affair or maybe a holiday to somewhere a little more exotic—Eastern Europe, or Borneo.
And then one day, Niles had said . . . had said. . . .
Nothing. He could not remember—it was hidden beneath the silvery cloud. Whatever wisdom had issued from his friend's mouth was lost, and no matter how he tried, he could not summon it back.
Unable to penetrate the mists in his own head, Paul found himself returning to the mechanism of the false universe around him. If the woman, Vaala or whatever her name was—he was beginning to feel like an idiot, thinking of her always as "the bird-woman" or "the angel"—was also resident in the network, why did she appear in so many ways and so many guises, while he himself stolidly remained Paul Jonas, despite the occasional change of clothing? How could there be more than one version of her, as when Penelope and the winged incarnation had faced each other across the fire on that windswept beach in Ithaca?
Perhaps she's not a real woman at all. The thought filled him with sudden dread. Perhaps she really is just code, like the other people in this bloody place—a slightly more complicated sort, but basically no more human than an electric pencil sharpener. But that would mean that other than a few travelers—"orphans," had that been her word?—like Azador and the woman Eleanora, he was alone in this tent-show universe.