What’s happened to me?
The warning came stubbornly from one corner of her mind. There was something strange about tonight. She wasn’t usually this way. Why had she felt such a strong urge to do this? Another mystery: why did it feel so good? It was better than it ever had been before. She could hardly believe it was her own body …
This isn’t fair to the others. I have to stop. I’m almost done—it’ll just be a moment.
Inside Stella, the surprising sensory power overwhelmed Julie, too, but she was also aware of something else: the fact that there was something in the toilet blowing bubbles.
The amber scent had faded.
Georges’s body was swallowed up by a large round of hunger. His last flickers of living sensation plunged into a terrible blank. (Julie recalled the Singing Sands with a shiver.)
When it had killed the last of the hunters, the giant Spider rattled its shell with satisfaction.
The holes from the two bullets from Georges’s gun that had entered its chest were its sole wound. Insignificant.
Or was it?
Julie was inside the Spider—or, more accurately, inside the bullets.
The small grains of Eye that had been packed into Georges’s ammunition let her see into the Spider’s interior.
It was a stark, bare space, like a room stripped of all furnishings. Water, outlets and light, circuit breaker, heat sink, soundproofing—the standard unit programs supporting the Realm at its root were exposed. The two bullets had entered an area where the parts were packed in tightly.
And now they were sprouting with incredible speed.
Their outer layers of lead torn away by the impact, they were revealed as two Eyes like black pearls. Grids had begun to grow from their surfaces. As its name suggested, the Black Grid drew expanding geometrical patterns in the air. The black of its lines had a deep, uniform gloss, and it grew as smoothly as the flowing of well-ground ink.
The grid was made up entirely of straight lines and right angles, but it was not regular. Its symmetry was skillfully disturbed in a lively rhythm similar to the branching of a tree.
The two seeds extended their grids as if in competition, eating away at the Spider’s thorax like inorganic tuberculosis. The inside of the Spider was stuffed with program parts, but the grids ate into those too. Where the parts already took up the space the grids wanted to expand into, the grids simply went through them without even slowing down.
What the grids were made of was unclear. The truth was that the Black Grid was so dangerous that it had been kept securely locked away for a long time. It was very rarely permitted to externalize its powers, so their details were known to nobody. This time, too, the risk had been too great to run tests in advance.
Perhaps the grid was not made of any specific material—perhaps it was a purely logical presence. That would make it unique in the Realm, but would not be so strange. Because what lurked inside the grid was a kind of virus, unable to infect anyone or anything but guaranteed to destroy whatever fell within its limited range.
The grid kept growing. As it did, its lines began to expand into surfaces.
Julie continued to observe the scene outside the Spider as well.
What interested the Spider was the hotel, and it had begun using its multiple eyestalks to examine the web stretched across the face of the building. It was searching for a weak spot.
But the giant Spider’s interior was very nearly full of the grid now. Its moments were numbered. The grid overflowed the Spider’s bounds, extending outward and making its host appear to be captured within a cage of thread.
Then the countdown reached zero.
Without a sound, the Spider disintegrated into a powder.
The lines and faces had sliced every part of it from every other part. The Spider became a fragment of some unintelligible white language and piled up in the west yard.
José took another drink of orange juice to wash his mouth out. The flavor was exquisite. Juice had never tasted this good to him before, he reflected. The aroma that spread across his tongue and into his throat was so fresh that it seemed to shine. Every mouthful he swallowed seemed to send flavor and fragrance through his capillaries to reach every cell in his body.
José found this mysterious.
Why was it so delicious?
It’s like my sense of smell and taste have gotten a hundred times better.
And then something else suddenly occurred to him.
What if it’s the opposite?
Maybe, instead of my sense of taste getting sharper,
the world around me has gotten a hundred times more vivid?
The perspiration dampening her body gave off a heady smell.
She was leaning forward, her breasts hanging heavy from her frame. Julie felt the weight.
Julie was as suspicious as Stella. Why was this so pleasurable?
Why was it so good?
Just as Julie was about to be swallowed up by the internal sensations that Stella stoked,
the water in the toilet boiled.
Legs emerged from the toilet. They were covered in sharp, needlelike fur striped yellow and black. There were two of them, then three, and they curled around Stella’s lower half before pulling sharply downward. Julie felt the sudden jerk and knew that Stella’s lower spine had been fractured.
The legs multiplied. Claws dug deep into Stella’s chest. A proboscis was thrust from the base of the toilet and inserted between her legs. A newly extended leg wrapped itself around her arm—currently reaching for the door—and twisted it off her body. Her shoulder made a sharp sound as it separated.
Perfect.
This Spider had been lurking in the hotel somewhere until Stella had aroused its attention and appetite, bringing it to the bathroom where she sat defenseless.
And that was what they had been waiting for.
Perfect.
Julie separated from Stella and viewed the foolish Spider from the outside.
Stella’s face disappeared.
Her maid uniform turned white and was sucked into her body.
All patterns and colors vanished from her surface mapping. Stella became a plain white mannequin. Then the mannequin began to warp and lose its shape. It became a paste, soft and amorphous and extremely sticky. The more the Spider struggled, the more trapped it became. The paste that had once been Stella extended pseudopods that stuck to the walls and floor of the bathroom, standing firm against the Spider’s escape. It had captured its attacker completely.
Stella was a decoy. There was no such AI. Her true form was the Glue, an Eye containing an amorphous, amoeba-like image. Her human shape, facial features, and clothing had all been added afterward.
Perfect. Julie departed the scene.
“No two ways about it,” said Luna. “A decoy has to smell good too.”
“Wasn’t it Pierre who had the idea of mixing the image of the woman from Femme Fatale into ‘Stella’?” said Donna.
“Yes, it was,” Yve said. “We couldn’t make Stella quite that wild and bewitching, but she certainly looked lifelike.”
“But this also means that the Spiders are in the hotel after all,” Anna said, concern in her face.
“It’ll be fine. We know exactly where they are.”
Three Spiders had infiltrated the hotel so far, and all three had been captured by a Stella. Yve and the others had been experimenting with how far they could let down their guard before the Spiders got in, and also testing the performance of the Glue. The Spiders’ activity patterns during infiltration had been cracked and shared throughout the net.
“There aren’t any more inside the hotel, and we have ten more Stellas in place anyway.”
“If only we could have left the guests to dolls like that, too,” Julie said.
The triplets laughed.
Yve furrowed her brow. Her pupilless eyes gazed into the distance. Movement, focus.
The men in the hotel’s front yard hotel pulled Catsilver’s daggers from the lawn and rushed the trees, crushing the remains of the Spiders underfoot like morning frost.
The man at the front of the group whirled his arm around and let his dagger fly. It fell among the Spiders in the trees. There was a deafening sound as fierce flames rose into the sky. The Spiders caught in the blast didn’t stand a chance.
The men roared, giddy with the heat of the moment. The sight of Spiders rolling around engulfed in flames filled them with joy. Yve shared in their heart-pounding excitement, finding it intoxicating.
Another man saw a Spider near death. He dropped to one knee, lifted the dagger high, and then plunged its blade down into the Spider’s eye-studded head. Seeing that it had survived the blow, the man—Pascal was his name—released the icy cold within the dagger, letting it saturate the body of his adversary. Pascal was familiar with the use of the Eyes. The Spider grew weaker, then died. Pascal’s exhilarated joy thrilled Yve too. A few hours earlier, Pascal had seen his elderly mother devoured by a Spider before his eyes. He could not forget the crunching of its teeth. When the frozen Spider before him began to crumble away, he pulled out his dagger and stalked toward the trees in search of his next adversary.
The trees around the edges of the yard thinned out quickly as stray daggers reduced them to ash and ice. Groves that had grown dense and rich for a thousand years were destroyed in the blink of an eye.
Pierre was running with the others, brandishing a blade of his own. The jangling of the chain at his wrist had awakened a powerfully exciting memory within him.
Yve tried a taste of that dubious excitement, finding it to derive from strong feelings of resentment and loathing toward the guests. As Pierre forced his way into the trees, the smell of moss and bark surrounded him in a gentle embrace, but he shoved it aside with the murderous bent of his shoulders.
Pierre was still unable to forget the treatment he had once received from a guest playing his sister, although he could no longer remember what number that guest had borne in the long procession of visitors. That week, the role of his sister had been bought by an old man, perhaps in his seventies. Pierre’s sister was nine. As her character was written, she was fond of arithmetic, Monopoly, and tending flowers. That week, “she” had donned a full-body black rubber suit—she was not quite four feet tall—stripped Pierre naked, and bound his hands behind his back. Her strength had been incredible. Pierre did not recall the experience in detail, perhaps because it had been so awful, but he did have vague memories of stiletto heels shaped like little penises.
And then there were the bars of metal—chain clasps—run through both of his wrists. The coldness and hardness violating his skin he remained unable to forget.
“I …” Pierre muttered.
I… He tried to address the guests who came from the real world.
I hate you
I’ll never forgive you
… …
I just wa… … ngs
Sh… sh… sh… … ing… scissors
Come aga… … soup… … sed.
… … nt you to… want …… but …… nt. / #$%!
Stop it.
Yve became aware of an irregularity.
Pierre’s thoughts had grown harder to trace. He was fading out of the TrapNet’s field of vision.
Pierre advanced into the trees, walking toward where the ferns grew thickly enough to form a large wall.
A mini-Spider… size of a fist… run… saw… …ed. The sweet scent of rotting leaves carpeting the damp summer earth and softly receiving Pierre’s heels as… …ped his forehead with… and the humid air …… droplets fell …ike a woman’s finger… …shing against …
As Yve watched in consternation, the image of Pierre grew indistinct, received now only in fragmentary sensations and isolated shreds of language. Was the net’s sensitivity degrading?
Yve worked desperately to recover the trace. She pursued Pierre through alternate routes as well, extending sensory tentacles through the Eyes carried by the men now dispersed throughout the forest.
This brought Pierre sharply into view. It was all right. He still existed. He was moving toward the wall of ferns as if following the lead of another.
Then Pierre parted the ferns with his hands, took a single step beyond them,
and vanished.
Pierre had completely disappeared from the net’s field of view.
Yve had locked on to him perfectly. And yet he had vanished by doing nothing more than ducking through an opening in the wall of ferns. The wall was not thick; one step would carry anyone through. You stepped in from this side and emerged from the other. That was all it was supposed to be, but in the space of that one step, Pierre had been swallowed into some other place.
Was her reception faulty?
Or was the situation worse than that?
The old man sitting on the sofa with his arm around Jules’s shoulders squeezed that arm tighter. Jules understood what this meant. On the other side of the Chandelier, Yve had gone pale. Something was obviously afoot.
“Well, Jules,” the old man whispered in his ear, “I’d say it’s finally begun.”
The AIs had memories like anyone else. Memories of when they were young, before the Realm had begun.
Some of the AIs’ memories they cherished like the accumulated trinkets and treasures of their youth. Other memories were cursed.
But had the events in those memories actually occurred?
José pondered this question often. Not in a sustained way, but there was always a part of him mulling it over somewhere inside his head. These thoughts never progressed beyond that, simply repeating quietly in the background. There was no answer. Nor did he seek one.
José still had his own childhood treasure box. It was a square cookie tin, lightened by rust. Stored inside were the things he had collected as a boy.
A dried-up butterfly.
A stamp soaked off an envelope.
A tiny blue glass bottle he had found on the shore.
A woman’s small handkerchief that still smelled faintly of camphor.
Memories resided yet within them. All José had to do was open the tin to recall the time when he had acquired each of these things.
Not during the thousand-times-repeated summer. These were events that had happened before.
The memories lingered within him, vivid and clear. His treasures, aids to recalling them, were safely in the cookie tin. He could reach out and touch them at any time.
But within the Costa del Número, those memories had never actually happened. They were part of the setting, written and recalled as having happened before the story began. The treasures were props arranged on stage. That was all there was to it.
José had been troubled by this matter from time to time since the repeating summer truly began. Yes: as the summer began, José had already attained his current age, and his treasures were all already in their place.
Memories like the contents in a boy’s box of treasures. But were they events that had really been?
And … José’s thoughts began to slow here. He became unable to go further.
This was a dark domain into which José’s thoughts did not extend.
In there lay memories beyond recall. Memories José could not see. But he knew, by their faint, bittersweet traces, that they were there.
What had they been?
What could have happened?
He could recall only a few segmented impressions—scraps of sensation.
A woman’s coat, opened wide.
Warm enfoldment in the naked body within.
A field of dewy grass, carpeted with tiny blue flowers that bloomed like jewels.
The
color of the flowers was exactly the same as the color of the sky.
The air was cold and freshly wet.
This memory binds me.
I am held in thrall by the memory of a memory.
The butterfly’s blue wings. The steamship on the stamp. The glass bottle with its silvery lid. The embroidery on the handkerchief.
The memories were vague, but their fragments were unusually clear.
Minute droplets of dew on the woman’s long, black hair.
Her remarkably long neck, elegant as a waterfowl’s.
The sleeves of her white summer coat, vividly daubed with blood.
Colorful summer flowers picked and gathered and spread in the shape of a bed in one corner of the grassy field. The woman standing beside it. Her cold, silvery laugh.
The events themselves he could not recall.
But he did recall one thing: a name.
Martin.
My younger brother.
A memory that had never actually occurred, from before the curtain rose on “this summer.”
Pierre was rooted to the spot with shock.
Who could possibly have imagined that beyond the parted ferns lay a luxurious boudoir with a gigantic, canopied bed?
The very love nest.
Of course, Pierre did not know that term.
But he could not help but be overwhelmed by the room’s many luxurious appointments, the luxury of the curtains that hung in layer upon layer about the bed and the lavish sense of depth that those many layers created, the exquisite timber from which the bed’s four posts were made and the stunning carvings executed upon them. Tone and material were in perfect harmony, seeming to breathe quietly in the carefully dimmed light. The beauty and extravagance here was of an entirely different order than that seen in the Mineral Springs Hotel’s executive suites or casino. The hotel was a compendium of the tastes of the wealthy bourgeoisie, offering to the undifferentiated public a common divisor of comfort. This room, however, had been made precisely to the specifications of one person in particular. No effort had been spared to align it with their tastes, and the result did not even bear comparison with the rooms of a wealthy bourgeois. In a word, it was noble.
The Thousand Year Beach Page 13
