Something happened to me today. The thought nagged at her in her semi-conscious state. Something I can’t remember.
Her memories had fragmented, bobbing into view before vanishing again. She had taken her students to the church. Choir practice. The chapel was old but sound lingered in its air pleasingly, and everyone had been looking forward to the outing. They were her students, but they were all taller than her. Fine young women grown beautiful as flowers.
No sooner had they begun to warm up than everyone’s mouths had dropped open. Turning to look, Odette had seen a round opening in the roof of the chapel.
That was where her memory grew disordered and unraveled.
It seemed to her that a hairy-faced giant had peered through the hole at them, but had she just hallucinated it?
Dozens and dozens of that face had fallen in on them. The faces had vomited sticky white spittle. She could remember nothing after that.
The more she concentrated and tried to recall the scene properly, the harder it was to see, as if she were touching the face of the water. Or, no—perhaps she was in the water, reaching up to touch the surface. She panicked, feeling on the verge of drowning, but she could not get her hand above the waterline.
“—way?” came a voice.
“—way?” These were words. The voice was the only thing that reached her from the surface, shooting through the water straight and true. Her mouth must be moving like a fish about to suffocate. She was trying to reply to the voice: Get me out of here.
“—way?” the voice repeated. It must be a voice she knew well. But what was it saying? It seemed to be asking about something she had done. She could not catch the words.
A hairy face trapped the fleeing, panicky Natalie and Agnès against the wall. It pinned Sophie and Nadine down. And then …
While that was going on, what was I doing?
“Did you run away?”
The voice spoke again. She felt a sudden shock, like being punched. Her mouth moved silently. Yes, I was cowardly. I was terrified and I fled, she confessed. That was what I was afraid to remember. Had the words come out? Whoever was calling to her, had they heard her speak?
“It’s all right, Madame. You had a terrible time.”
The voice was like a powerful arm thrust into the water. She took hold of it and held on desperately. She felt the sensation of being pulled up and out.
“You’re safe now, Madame.”
Odette realized that she was lying on her side in a small boat. She had come to her senses. Sitting up, she saw the sea all around. Her face calm now that her panic was under control, the elderly teacher looked at José van Dormael.
“It was you?” she asked. “I should have known. That was why I was saved—because it was you.” Tears fell from her eyes. The next, inevitable battle would be with her own self-recrimination. “Thank you.”
“This is the last boat,” said José.
The men who had stayed at the crossroads until the last moment were on board, as well as the last few refugees, collapsed with apparent exhaustion. The west end of the town was gone. The chapel, too, and the agony of all those girls who had died there.
“I see,” she said.
The little boat made its way east, cliffs to the right, tiny single engine roaring.
The aged teacher looked back just once in the direction where “west” had been. Most of the expanse of ocean that should have been there was already gone, vanished into snaking bands of black.
When they eventually came down from the mountain and met Anne, that was when Jules’s legs gave way under him and Julie finally burst into wailing sobs, not stopping until they arrived at the bay. Anne brought them in safely, her arms firm around their shoulders. Her broad hands were a welcome reassurance.
They finally entered the east bay just after one in the afternoon.
It had been three hours since their encounter at the Singing Sands, and two hours since Anne had arrived at the Mineral Springs Hotel.
The bay was unbelievably still.
The summer houses and sanitarium rest areas had been thrown open to refugees from the west, as had the clubhouse at the marina. The sick and injured were taken to the Mineral Springs itself. The sky was calmer than it had been during the Spiders’ great descent. The cloud cover had thinned enough here and there for the blue sky behind it to show through.
It’ll surely clear up by nighttime, thought Jules, as if praying. The stars will come out. Surely.
Jules and Julie had both escaped serious injury, but because they were minors, and because Julie had mentioned their victory over a Spider, they were brought to the hotel, where a makeshift Town Hall had been established as planned.
The two of them were shown into the main dining hall, now redesignated the conference room. The Town Hall employees sat across the long table from them. How, they were asked, had Julie defeated the spider?
“Before that,” said Julie, staring down the adults obstinately, “tell me where Mama is. Or I won’t tell you a thing.”
A short, burly old man who introduced himself as Bastin, the deputy mayor, rose from his seat. His close-cropped hair was pure white, but his eyebrows were bushy and pure black, and there was candor in his large, round eyes.
“In that case,” he said, “Let me tell you how things stand with the town. None of us has much time, so I won’t hold anything back. After I finish, you tell us everything we want to know. Do we have a deal?”
“Fine.” Julie nodded.
“The west end of town has been completely destroyed.
“The Spiders devoured it. In its place there is now nothing but a gigantic hole.
“The hole engulfed everything from the homes and orchards at the foot of the mountains to the downtown area and harbor. It may grow larger yet. For anyone who was caught in the area, there is no hope. That group includes the mayor and the chief of police. Those who were able to escape we have taken in at this bay. We are checking everyone against the local police station’s roll of residents as they arrive. However, Jules Tappy, Julie, none of your family members have appeared yet.”
Julie was silent.
“Even the summary I just gave you is somewhat understated,” said Bastin. “We, by which I mean the entire east bay, are surrounded by holes. Far more of the Realm has been consumed by Spiders and turned to void than has not.
“Fortunately for us, for some reason the Spider attack has ceased for now. We must use this time to get ourselves back in order. There are almost a thousand people here, and we must protect them. We chose the hotel for its superb collection of Glass Eyes. We have nothing you could call weaponry in this Realm, and so we must borrow the power of the Eyes, fight with the Eyes to defeat the Spiders.”
Jules remembered breakfast that morning, the same as any other morning. Papa has nowhere to return to now, he thought.
“Julie,” said Bastin. “I understand you are a spectacularly gifted user of the Eyes. The three sisters who brought you here are also masters of the Glass Eyes. This fills me with great confidence. Furthermore, you report that you have eliminated one Spider already. I assume that you used an Eye to do so. I want you to tell us exactly how.”
“All right.”
Julie’s voice snapped Jules out of his reverie.
Wiping the tears from her eyes, she was doing her best to fulfill her promise to Bastin. Her lips trembled, as did her shoulders.
“The Spider was starving. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. It came to me. Jules noticed it too.”
Bastin nodded. Everyone had sensed that hunger.
“When the Spider erased Pointed Rock and turned toward us, I was petrified. Just facing it made me feel as if I would be sucked into it and disappear. Not just feel—for a moment I did start to disappear. Jules was behind me, so he might not have realized it.
“The outline of my body began
to tremble finely and become blurred and indistinct. The hem of my dress started turning transparent. I understood then that some sort of power was pouring out of the Spider. I thought, ‘This must be how it made the rock disappear. But if this power can affect things in the Realm, it must abide by the rules of the Realm too. And if that’s so, I can use this Eye.’ Glass Eyes can exert their effects on anything in the realm at all. I didn’t know what kind of power this hunger was exactly, but I thought it should be easy to alter its course while leaving its essential nature unchanged. Well, I say that I ‘thought’ this, but really my body moved of its own accord. And then …”
Julie was already weeping again, but she didn’t stop speaking for a moment. She faced directly forward and continued her report. Bastin made no move to stop her.
“And then I tried just that. I captured the incredible hunger pouring out of the Spider with Cottontail, and sent it right back. And it worked. The Spider disappeared… Is that enough?”
“More than enough. Rest for a while.” The deputy mayor rose to his feet. He spread his short arms and embraced Julie. He was not much taller than her.
“Mr. Deputy Mayor …” she said.
“It’s Bastin,” he told her. “Call me Bastin.”
“Bastin. I was in school with Agnès, your granddaughter,” said Julie. “Is she all right?”
“Thank you for asking, Julie. I have asked everyone to keep looking for her. But she hasn’t been found yet.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No, I’m the one asking too many questions. Thank you.”
“Bastin?”
“Yes?”
“This …” Julie unwound Cottontail from her arm and handed it to Bastin. Jules was shocked. Julie giving one of her Eyes away was unthinkable. “This is the Eye I was talking about just now. He’s a good boy. I think he has the knack of it now. He can help you.”
Bastin gazed at the Eye for a moment before producing a handkerchief and reverently accepting Cottontail into it. The handkerchief was stained with blood.
“This is all I have,” he said. “My apologies.”
“Mr. Deputy Mayor,” said Jules.
“Yes, Jules Tappy?” Bastin turned to face him.
“Handing out Eyes and hoping for the best won’t be enough to save the hotel. But I have an idea.”
“In that case …” Bastin had already shifted gears, it seemed. “Let me hear it. Right away.” His face glowed in the light from Cottontail on his handkerchief. It made Jules realize that Bastin’s eyes were the same blue as the ocean that the town looked out on.
“Before that, Bastin,” Jules said, thrusting his chest out as best he could, “I want all the information you have about the Spiders, please. Maintenance blueprints for the hotel, too. Also … let Julie take a shower.”
“Understood.” Bastin’s weary eyes softened.
And so began the hopeless twelve-hour defensive campaign at the Mineral Springs Hotel.
What does it mean to remember?
What is a memory?
When a reader opens a book to the very first page, the characters in it already have memories. They possess pasts. At the moment the story begins, they can remember what happened beforehand. But where did they have those experiences? When were they accumulating those memories?
This is a question that no one can answer.
What about the Costa del Número?
One thousand years since the Grand Down.
Fifty years leading up to it.
And before that? Before the day the Realm of Summer had opened for business and its first guests had arrived?
On that day, the AIs had greeted their guests looking exactly the same as they did today. They had not aged a year since then. But even they had memories from earlier—memories of their youth.
These memories were part of the setting—the lore established by the Realm’s scriptwriters. How the town had become established, what sort of lives the AIs lived there: everything had been covered with exacting care.
This was highly gratifying for the guests too. An empty stage with no history and characters without fleshed-out timelines aroused little excitement. And for this Realm in particular, that mattered.
It mattered a lot.
The AIs knew, of course, that their memories had never really been played out in the Realm. They knew that the experiences that had formed their personalities were imaginary. And they knew that these things had been built into them simply for the guests to take an interest in.
For all that, the AIs cherished these memories as their very own, priceless and irreplaceable.
But—
But had those events truly never happened? If so, why could the AIs remember them? How was it possible?
Beneath the hundreds, the thousands of Realms lay something else. Something that was not visible from any of them. No AI could access this domain of their own volition; indeed, they not one denizen of the Realms was even aware it existed.
The Costa del Número’s back room.
Its highest level was where the memories of the world accumulated. Any event that took place in a Realm was added to the billions of episode membranes thickly layered in this record area. It was a vast library of all that had happened in the Realms.
The level below this was for events that hadn’t taken place in the Realms. Here the layers were even thicker, recording things deemed to have happened before the birth of the Realms—their settings, in the form of their histories.
This was the basis of the AIs’ memories.
Here their memories lay in quiet stacks, framed like biological specimens.
But there was a deeper level still.
The domain in which the ChronoManager dwelled.
A system that flawlessly directed the timelines of thousands of separate Realms, guaranteeing the guests smooth entry into and travel between those worlds.
This domain was also home to several thousand monk-like figures that were anthropomorphized representations of the low-level AIs who worked there. These AIs were sexless, able, and diligent, but incapable of advanced thought or emotion. Dressed in black uniforms with stand-up collars, they glided soundlessly through the maze of sheer, towering walls that filled their world, busily performing tasks whose end could not be foreseen. They used ladders and footholds to climb up and down and across the walls, checking the clockfaces embedded in the sheer surfaces to ensure that each was without deviation and advancing as planned. They also busily wiped off any dust that had settled on the blue glass covering the clocks.
In that domain, after the Grand Down, a single change had occurred.
One day, a boy in a white hoodie had appeared there. On his shoulders and at his waist clung a total of seven little Spiders. From the first moment of his appearance—and the mere fact of his having a gender had astonished the sexless AIs—he had walked around as if he owned the place, confident and self-assured. He paid no heed to the black-clad locals at their chores, which caused minor inconveniences for them wherever he went.
The AIs were vexed and suspicious, but they made their peace with his presence.
They had no other choice.
Because—
Because
The night had deepened and the fireplace had been lit, less for the warmth than for the sense of calm. After a light meal, each of the adults was served a small glass of vin chaud, while Jules and Julie received warm milk. In the first mouthful Jules detected the faint scent of brandy. He set the ceramic cup on the table, which was long enough to seat at least ten.
“Aren’t you cold, Jules?” Yvette Carrière asked him from across the table. As usual, her voice was as gentle as milk. Her smile suited her plump cheeks well.
Jules gazed around at the people gathered in the casino of the Mineral Springs Hotel. To a one, they were
drained, wounded, beaten. Two hundred–odd AIs had taken refuge in the hotel by now. There had been no other survivors.
“I’m okay. Completely fine.”
Yve smiled and returned to her handwork.
The Spiders’ brutal assault had begun at three in the afternoon, only slowing as evening fell. The clock now showed eight o’clock. The casino had not originally had anything so gauche as a clock in it; the standing clock from the lobby had been brought in at considerable effort.
Watching the flames in the fireplace after a shower and a meal, Jules had to admit he felt calmer. The solid wooden furnishings, the leather chairs, the slightly dimmed illumination had a soothing effect. The fire and the drinks had all been arranged on the orders of Denis, the manager. Making people feel at home was his chosen profession.
Yve hadn’t touched her hot wine, which had by now gone cold.
“Aren’t you going to drink that?” asked Jules.
“Not me. If we fall behind schedule because of me, how could I face the others?”
Yve’s hands never stopped moving. Candlesticks and electric lamps had been gathered to ensure that those hands, at least, were brightly lit, but her beautiful chestnut eyes had little use for light.
Spread out before her was a large, oval-shaped tablecloth.
It was woven of thin, sparkling silver thread, and almost finished. Intricate lace was used generously throughout its design, and Yve was set to complete it at astonishing speed—less than two hours had passed since she had begun her work. She had good reason to hurry. Whether the Mineral Springs Hotel lived or died would all come down to this tablecloth of knitted Spider silk.
Julie was sitting beside Jules. She patted him on the shoulder.
“You should get some rest too,” she said.
“Yeah.”
Jules leaned back in his chair. Cottontail was already asleep, breathing slowly and regularly in Julie’s lap. The adults had borrowed the Eye to help make the hotel into a fortress, and it had come back exhausted. But Julie was more fatigued yet. She was knitting like Yve. Her piece was almost done as well, but it was a great deal smaller than Yve’s.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 7
