by Tad Williams
"But you said you remembered something—a leafy place, trees, a garden, something like that. And you said my name sounded familiar."
She shrugged her slender shoulders. "It is strange, I admit."
Paul was becoming increasingly conscious of an odd grinding sound coming from outside, but he was unwilling to be distracted. "It's more than strange. And if I know anything in the world, it is that you and I have met before." He moved closer and took her hand in his. She resisted for only a moment, then allowed him to possess it. He felt as though he could draw strength from the mere contact. "Listen, Professor Bagwalter—he's one of the people who helped rescue you—he asked me some very strange questions. I felt they should mean something to me, but they didn't. He called this place a simulation, for one thing."
"A simulation? Did he mean an illusion, like the trickery practiced by the Soombar's priests?"
"I don't know. And he mentioned names, lots of names. 'Shongloor' was one of them. The other was something like 'June Bough.' "
There was a rustle at the tent door. Paul turned to see Gally pulling the flap aside. The harsh whining noise was markedly louder. "Paul, come see! They're almost here. And it's the most wonderful machine!"
Paul was irritated, but it was hard to ignore the boy's excitement. He turned back to find that Vaala had pushed herself against the tent wall, her black eyes wide.
"What is it?"
"That name." She lifted her long-fingered hands as though to keep something away, "I . . . I do not like it."
"Which name?"
"Paul, come on!" Gally was pulling at his arm. The grinding was very loud now, and there was a deeper noise beneath it that he could feel through the very sand beneath the tent floor. It was almost impossible to ignore.
"I'll be back in a moment," he told Vaala, then allowed Gally to lead him out the door of the tent, where he stopped in astonishment.
Waddling down the valley toward the camp was the strangest machine he had ever seen or could ever imagine seeing, a huge four-legged device almost a hundred feet long that looked like nothing so much as a mechanical crocodile made of metal beams and polished wooden panels. The head was as narrow as the prow of a ship; the back, except for three giant smokestacks belching steam, was covered with striped tenting. Flywheels turned, pistons plunged up and down, and steam whistled from the vents as the thing slowly made its way down the slope. Paul could just dimly see several tiny figures standing in a recessed space on the top of the head.
"Isn't it grand!" shouted Gally over the racket.
Professor Bagwalter appeared around the corner of one of the tents and approached them. "Frightfully sorry about all this!" he bellowed. "They just called on the radiophone. Apparently they're from the Tellari Embassy. Supposed to perform some kind of check on our arrangements before we leave for the back of beyond. Some little irritation devised by the Soombar's mandarins, I have no doubt. Our embassy wallahs are always trying to stay on the Soombar's good side, which usually means bad luck for the rest of us."
"Do you think it has anything to do with rescuing Vaala?" Paul shouted, watching in helpless fascination as the monstrous vehicle crawled to a halt a few dozen yards outside the camp, shuddering and piping like a tea kettle as its boilers were vented. A golden sun was painted on its side, surrounded by four rings, the inner two and outermost white, the third bright green.
"Oh, I rather doubt that, old man. You saw how slow the thing is. They would have had to set out a couple of days ago."
As the clamor of the device died down, Paul heard Vaala's wings rustling behind him. He blindly reached out a hand; a moment later, he felt her fingers close around his.
"What is it?"
"Someone from the Embassy. But it might be a good idea if they didn't see you," he said.
The great mechanical head had settled to within only a few feet of the ground. Now the side of it opened up, tumbling outward in an array of hinged plates that formed a stairway. A pair of figures moved out of the shade of the awning toward the steps.
"I suppose I'd better make myself useful," said Bagwalter, starting toward the strange crocodile-machine.
Something about the men moving down the stairway struck Paul with a pang of unease. The first was thin and angular, something glinted on his face as though he wore spectacles like the professor's. The second, only now emerging from shadow, was so grotesquely fat that he seemed to be having a difficult time descending. Paul stared, his fear growing. There was something dreadful about this pair, something that radiated chill through his thoughts.
Vaala was moaning in his ear. As he turned toward her, she jerked her hand away and took a stumbling step back. Her eyes were so wide with horror that he could see white all the way around her dark pupils.
"No!" She shivered as though with a fever. "No! I will not let those two have me again!"
Paul grabbed at her, but she had already moved out of reach. He darted a glance back at the new arrivals, who were just reaching the bottom of the stairs. Hurley Brummond and Joanna were stepping forward to welcome them, and the professor was only a few yards behind.
"Come back," he called to Vaala. "I'll help you—"
She spread her wings, then took a few steps away from the tents and brought the great pinions down; they beat the air with an audible crack. They flapped again and again and her feet began to lift from the red sand.
"Vaala!" He sprinted after her, but she was already six feet off the ground and rising. Her wings spread wider, catching the thin desert breeze, and she vaulted higher still. "Vaala!" He jumped, reaching hopelessly, but she was already as small and far away as—the notion came to him without source or explanation—an angel atop a Christmas tree.
"Paul? Where is she going?" Gally seemed to think it was some kind of game.
Vaala was moving rapidly toward the hills, flying strongly now. As Paul watched her growing more distant, he could almost feel his heart turning to stone inside him. Below, the fat shape and the thin shape were in some kind of heated conversation with the professor. They radiated a terrible wrongness— even a quick glance at them now filled him with the terror that must have forced Vaala into flight. He turned and dashed down the slope toward the far side of the camp.
"Paul?" Gally's voice was growing faint behind him. He hesitated, then turned and ran back toward the boy.
"Come on!" he shouted. Every moment wasted seemed an eternity. His past, his entire history, was disappearing rapidly toward the hills, and something dreadful was waiting for him at the bottom of the valley. Gally stared, confused. Paul waved his arms frantically. As the boy finally began to trot toward him, Paul turned and bolted toward the anchored airships.
He had already scrambled onto the nearest ship, the one that had brought them, when Gally caught up. He leaned down and pulled the boy aboard, then raced toward the helm.
"What are you doing? Where did the lady go?"
Bagwalter and the others had finally noticed that something was amiss. Joanna, shielding her eyes with her other hand, was pointing at Vaala, now little more than a pale spot in the blue sky, but Hurley Brummond was pelting toward the airship at a great pace. Paul forced himself to examine the mahogany panel that contained the controls. There were a number of small brass levers. Paul flipped one. Deep inside the hull, a bell rang. Paul cursed and flipped the rest. Something began to throb beneath his feet.
"Damn it, man, what do you think you're doing?" Brummond shouted. He was only a few dozen yards away now, covering ground swiftly with his great tigerish strides. His look of irritated disbelief was hardening into fury, and he was already fumbling for the saber at his belt.
Paul pulled back on the wheel. The airship shuddered, then began to rise. Brummond reached the spot where it had been and jumped, but fell short and tumbled back to the ground in a cloud of dust. The two new arrivals were hurrying forward, arms waving.
"Don't be a fool, Jonas!" Professor Bagwalter shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. "There's no need
to. . . ." His voice became too faint to hear as the airship rapidly gained altitude. Paul turned his eyes upward. Vaala was only a pinpoint on the horizon, already traveling above the sawtoothed hills.
The camp quickly fell away behind them. The ship rocked and pitched as Paul struggled to decipher the controls, then abruptly rolled sideways. Gally slid down the polished floor of the cockpit, only saving himself by a last-moment clutch at Paul's leg. Paul wrestled the ship back more or less level, but it was not stable, and they were receiving rough handling in the windier skies above the hills.
Vaala was a little closer now. Paul felt a moment's sense of satisfaction. They would catch her, and the three of them would flee together. Together, they would solve all the riddles.
"Vaala!" he called, but she was still too distant to hear him.
As they came across the crest of the hills a sudden gust of wind pushed them sideways once more. Despite Paul's straining hands on the wheel, the ship's nose dipped down. Another gust set them spinning and he lost control. Gally clung to his leg, shouting in terror. Paul pulled back on the wheel until his joints were aflame with agony, but the ship kept tumbling. First the ground leaped up at them, then they were falling into the sky, then the ground was springing at them once more. Paul had a brief, cracked glimpse of the Great Canal writhing below them like a dark serpent, then something smacked against his head and the world exploded into sparks.
CHAPTER 31
Bleak Spaces
NETFEED/MUSIC: Dangerous Sonics Banned
(visual: young woman in pressurized hospital tent)
VO: After a series of injuries and one death during the latest tour by the power wig band Will You Still Love Me When My Head Comes Off, promoters have banned the use of sound equipment that operates outside the range of human hearing. The ban was prompted when American and European insurance companies declared they would no longer insure events where "dangerous sonics" are used.
(visual: clip from "Your Blazing Face Is My Burning Heart")
WYSTLMWMHCO and other power wig groups have in turn threatened to boycott the US and Europe if necessary, saying they cannot allow bureaucrats to interfere with their artistic expression.
Renie hated it when her father sulked, but this was one time she had no intention of indulging him. "Papa, I have to do this. It's for Stephen. Isn't that important to you?"
Long Joseph rubbed his face with knob-knuckled hands. "Of course it's important, girl. Don't you be telling me I don't care about my boy. But I think all this computer monkeyshines is foolishness. You going to make your brother better with some kind of game?"
"It's not a game. I wish it was." She examined her father's face. There was something different about him, but she couldn't quite decide what "Are you worried about me at all?"
He snorted. "What? Worried that you going to drown in some bathtub full of jelly? Already told you what I think of that."
"Papa, I might be online for days—maybe a week. You could make things a little easier." Her patience was beginning to sift away. Why did she even try to talk to him? What did it ever bring her except aggravation and heartache?
"Worried about you." Her father scowled, then looked down. "I worry about you all the time. I worry about you since you were a little baby. I break my back to give you a home, put food in your mouth. When you get sick, I pay for the doctor. Your mama and me, we sat up nights praying for you when you had that bad fever."
She suddenly realized what was different. His eyes were clear, his words unslurred. The departing troops that had occupied this underground site had taken everything portable that was of value, which had included any stocks of alcohol. Her father had made the beer he'd bought on the way in last as long as he could, but he had finished it the day before yesterday. No wonder he was in a foul mood.
"I know you worked hard, Papa. Well, now it's my turn to do what I can for Stephen. So please don't make it any more difficult than it needs to be."
He finally turned back toward her, his eyes red-rimmed, his mouth curved in a petulant frown. "I'll be fine. Nothing for a man to do around here anyway. And you—don't you get yourself killed in that thing, girl. Don't let it fry your brain or some foolishness like that. And don't blame me if it do."
And that, Renie supposed, was the closest he was going to come to telling her he loved her.
"I'll try not to get my brain fried up, Papa. God knows, I'll try."
"I wish one of us had some medical training." She was examining with some distaste the IV cannula secured to her arm under a thin sheath of permeable latex membrane. "I'm not very happy about having to do this out of a manual. And a military manual at that."
Jeremiah shrugged as he fitted the same device onto !Xabbu's thin arm. "It's not so difficult. My mother was in a car accident and had a wound that needed to be drained. I did all that."
"We will be well, Renie," said !Xabbu. "You have done a good job preparing everything."
"I hope so. But it seems like something always gets missed." She carefully lowered herself into the gel. Once covered, she removed her undergarments and tossed them out over the side. She doubted that Jeremiah cared one way or the other, and her father was off poking around in the kitchen supplies, unwilling to watch the sealing of the sarcophagi, but she still felt uncomfortable being naked in the presence of her friends. !Xabbu, who had no such inhibitions, had removed his clothes long ago, and sat through Jeremiah's last-minute instructions in unperturbed nakedness.
Renie connected the IV tube to the shunt in her arm, then fixed the urinary catheter and solid waste hoses in place, repressing a shudder at their unpleasant, intrusive touch against her flesh. This was no time to be squeamish. She had to think of herself as a soldier going behind enemy lines. The mission was the most important thing—all other considerations must be secondary. She went over her mental checklist for the dozenth time, but there was nothing left undone. All the monitoring and adjustment would be done by the V-tank itself, through the plasmodal gel. She fitted the mask and signaled to Jeremiah to turn on the air. When she felt the slightly clammy rush of oxygen in the mouth-bubble, she slid down below the surface.
She floated in dark weightlessness, waiting for Jeremiah to put the system online. It seemed to take forever. She wondered if there could be a problem with !Xabbu's rig. Perhaps his machinery was faulty, and she would have to go by herself. The thought, and the depth of her own unhappiness in reaction, frightened her. She had come to depend on the small man, on his calm presence and good sense, more than she really liked to depend on anyone, but that did not change the fact of her dependency.
"Renie?" It was Jeremiah, talking to her through the hear-plugs. "Is everything okay?"
"I'm fine. What are we waiting for?"
"Nothing. You're ready to go." For a long silent moment, she thought he'd gone offline. "And good luck. Find out who did that to the doctor."
"We'll do our best." Online gray suddenly surrounded her, a sea of staticky nothingness with no surface or bed. "!Xabbu? Can you hear me?"
"I am here. We have no bodies, Renie."
"Not yet. We need to make contact with Singh first."
She summoned up the military base's operating system, a typically unimaginative control panel full of view windows, simulated buttons, and switches, then keyed the preprogrammed connection Martine had sent them. The control panel blinked various waiting messages, then the panel and the surrounding gray disappeared, swallowed by blackness. After a few moments, she heard the French woman's familiar voice: "Renie?"
"Yes, it's me. !Xabbu?"
"I am here, too."
"All present. Martine. Why are there no visuals?"
Singh's voice rasped in her hearplugs. "Because I don't have the time or inclination to entertain you with pretty pictures. We'll have more visuals than we can stand if we can get into this system."
"Nevertheless," said Martine, "you will need to set some default standards for your simulated forms. Monsieur Singh says that many of the n
odes on this network will automatically assign sims upon entry, but some will not. Some of those that do will be influenced by the user's own selections, so you should choose something comfortable."
"And not too goddamn conspicuous," added Singh.
"How can we do that? Whose system are we on, anyway?"
Martine did not answer, but a small holograph cube appeared from the darkness in front of her. Renie found that using standard VR manipulations she could build an image inside it.
"Hurry up," growled Singh. "I've got a window coming up in about fifteen minutes and I don't want to miss it."
Renie pondered. If this Otherland network was actually a huge VR playground for the rich and powerful, as Singh seemed to believe, then a sim that was too generic, too low-rent, would attract the wrong kind of attention. She would indulge herself for once and have something nice.
She wondered whether it would be best to costume herself as a man. After all, the alpha males of the human world hadn't changed much in the last two thousand years, and from what she knew, very few of them seemed to think very highly of women. But on the other hand, perhaps that in itself was a reason not to pretend to be something other man what she was.
If your average crazed, want-to-rule-the-world multizillionaire tended not to think of a woman as an object of respect, especially a young African woman, perhaps there was no better way of being underestimated than to be herself.
"I had a dream last night." !Xabbu's disembodied voice startled her. "A very strange dream about Grandfather Mantis and the All-Devourer."
"Sorry?" She chose the basic human female armature, which appeared in the cube, impersonal as a wire sculpture.
"It comes from a story I learned as a young man, a very important story of my people."
Renie could feel herself frowning as she tried to concentrate on the image of the sim. She gave it her own dark skin and close-cropped hair, then stretched it until it more closely resembled her small-breasted, long-limbed frame. "Do you think you could tell me later, !Xabbu? I'm trying to make a sim for myself. Don't you have to do the same?"