“Do you think we have time to sit around looking sad?” demanded Julie.
The three sisters bit their lips. Why hadn’t they noticed before the net had gotten so tattered and worm-eaten? They’d spent most of their time inside the Chandelier, keeping the net afloat. Controlling the sensory reactor’s inflow and exhaust, maintaining overall stability, checking for broken connections and missing Eyes.
While Yve and Julie focused their senses more sharply to provide fine support at specific points, the three sisters had spread their bodily senses thin, covering the entire net to keep it running at normal temperature, so to speak. And because the sisters all had exactly the same senses, they had also been monitoring each other. They should have noticed the wormholes earlier.
“We have to tell Jules,” said Julie.
Yve raised her head.
Luna was the first to notice. She cried out briefly before covering her mouth with her hand.
“What’s wrong?” Donna asked. Following Luna’s gaze, she glanced at Yve’s eyes and cried out as well.
In the center of the beautiful, chestnut-colored iris of Yve’s right eye, a tiny black hole had opened.
The men at the entrance were mopping up the Spiders left behind when their fellows scattered into the woods.
Pascal, he of the murdered elderly mother, dangled one of Catsilver’s daggers from each hand as he walked, with several more tucked into his belt. He had already finished off four spiders, and he would not be satisfied until he had killed them all. Only this would satisfy his thirst for vengeance.
“I know how that feels.”
Suddenly, Pascal realized that he was walking alongside Felix the tailor. He had been alone a moment ago, and had not detected the man’s approach, but at some point the two had begun walking together. Still, Pascal did not pay it any mind. His thoughts were directed toward the Spiders, and then there was the fact that Felix’s voice had simply slipped into his breast without resistance. Even though he had always hated Felix’s piping, self-centered whining before. Felix reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a pair of scissors. The two blades were long and well sharpened—a beautiful sight. Felix gazed at them, turning them this way and that, as he continued in that irritating voice.
“Pascal,” he said. “Everyone knows how much you cared for your mother.”
That’s right, Pascal thought. But nobody really understands about Mother and me. The thought filled him with grief. It occurred to him suddenly that it might be all right to talk to Felix about it. His breast was full to bursting.
The scent of the forest was powerful. They were walking in deep darkness that had risen around them, as if it were the color of that scent. Pascal breathed deeply of the smell of darkness. He felt as if his psyche were sinking deeper and deeper inside him, and wondered why. The loathing of the Spiders that had seethed through him mere moments ago had now changed its course.
Pascal came to a sudden halt. There was no one around, of course. Since the moment he’d stepped into the forest, he had been on his own.
Pascal looked at his hand. In it was a pair of scissors with long, beautiful blades.
Pascal cocked his head. What was a pair of scissors doing there? He saw his face reflected in the blades.
Then he muttered, “Ah, I see.” What were they doing there? Wasn’t it obvious?
He set about using the scissors to cut open his chest.
In the hotel’s front yard, thirty or so men were sipping hot coffee. Bastin and Denis were among their number.
A cloud covered the moon, and darkness suddenly fell.
Bastin was thinking about his immediate goals—to survive the night and, after that, the following day. If the hotel lasted until morning, it would serve as their stronghold. Tomorrow they would have to search for some other plan of attack. Presumably some sort of guerilla action, mustering every scrap of material that remained in the Realm. A long war of attrition was coming. But for tonight it would be enough to survive.
Despite this, some of the men had pushed too far into the woods. Excited by their initial success, they had not come back. After all his warnings about not going in too deep! Pierre, Pascal… At least ten men were missing. The farther into the woods they went, the more they would be tempted to go it alone, allowing the Spiders to pick them off one by one. Their situation was the exact opposite of this. They had to be guerillas, lure the Spiders into their domain. Now was the time to keep numbers up, preserve strength. Bastin stared at the entrance to the woods, eyes narrowed and arms crossed.
Suddenly Bastin recalled Julie’s crying face. The little girl who had offered him Cottontail as she sobbed. How many times had she come to their aid over the past thousand years, he and his now-departed wife and their granddaughter Agnès? And now she was in the Casino, doing her part as best she could. He had to make sure the hotel lasted the night.
The front doors opened behind him. Stella, the maid, appeared, pushing a trolley with a new pot of coffee and cups.
“A piping-hot new pot, Mr. Deputy Mayor,” she said. “Everyone else has had some. Won’t you take a cup too?”
“I’m still waiting on some of the men,” Bastin said. “I’ll be a little longer.”
“They’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
“I hope so.”
The cloud passed. The moon emerged and the yard brightened again.
Stella cried out.
A group of men had emerged from the darkness of the forest and staggered into the bright yard. He saw Pascal among them.
Bastin grinned despite himself. “And there we are,” he said. “They look fine to me.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Stella said with a cheerful smile of her own. “And just in time for steak.”
“An Angel. By which you mean …?”
The boy Langoni just shrugged. “Good question,” he said. “I’d like to know myself.”
He didn’t seem to be dissembling. His answers were gradually getting less considered. Something else was on his mind.
“A kind of disaster, I suppose,” the boy added eventually.
“‘Disaster’… You mean those cold-looking dolls? They were the disaster?”
“Those, and also that mine you saw on the whale. The Realm I showed you just now was one of the larger ones in the Costa del Número, and, as I’m sure you figured out from the flying machines, its technology was fairly advanced. Just like the Realm of Summer was created as an unsophisticated, inconvenient town where people might spend a summer holiday, the theme of the Realm you just saw was one-night experiences in a more decorative city where an alternate technology developed. I would have liked to show you the city at ground level, too. It’s wonderful stuff—the whole place was steeped in the same colorful, humorous design sense as a cuckoo clock. Buildings, cars, everything. It makes you want to grab a pepper shaker from a cafe to take home with you. A work of incredible invention and taste. You sensed that sort of peaceful goodwill from the design of the flying machines, right?
“But that Realm has become something quite different now.”
José was frankly overwhelmed. He was speaking to a boy who had traveled through so many Realms that he could judge them, compare them with each other. A boy who knew a great deal about the essence of the Costa del Número and was busily working on something very important. On top of that, the boy was enormously powerful.
José was gripped by a strong emotion. To his surprise, it was envy.
“I can’t explain what happened to the town,” Langoni continued. “In a way, the whole Realm became an Angel, but I doubt you would understand it all either.”
“When you say ‘disaster,’ what exactly do you mean?” José asked.
“A severe change that threatens us AIs and our Realms, and whose essential components are beyond our control or indeed the control of the disaster itself.
That’s about the size of it. The same sort of thing as the heavy weather and stormy seas that you worry about. The difference is, this disaster wasn’t originally planned as part of the Costa.”
José was silent. The boy was effectively admitting that he and his companions were helpless against the Angel. He was speaking more harshly now, without style or modulation. What was he in relation to the Angel?
“Is the Angel antagonistic to you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” the boy said after a brief pause.
“Are you planning to use the TrapNet as a weapon against it?”
“Yes. Of course.”
José hesitated for a moment, then plunged ahead with his next question.
“What part of the TrapNet has that kind of power?”
Langoni smiled forlornly. “I think you know already, don’t you?” he said.
“The Eyes?” asked José.
Another pause. “Those too,” Langoni said.
“But they aren’t essential.’
Yet another pause. “No. They aren’t essential.”
José let out a long sigh. “If you mean what I think you mean,” he said, “That won’t do at all.” He sagged into a desk chair, shaking his head listlessly. “Just don’t.”
The boy cocked his head and smiled.
“Please,” said José. “Anything but that.”
The wind blew in off the ocean and ruffled Langoni’s neatly trimmed bangs. His long eyes remained fixed on José.
“Please,” José said again.
“No.”
José tried frantically to read Langoni’s eyes. Wasn’t there somewhere he could strike at the boy hard enough to shake him? An emotion, a memory … Whatever happened, he could not let the boy do that.
“Langoni,” José said, using the boy’s name for the first time.
Langoni’s eyebrows raised a fraction.
“Have we met before, you and I?”
It was a bluff, but for a moment the boy’s eyes opened wide.
“We’d better get started,” Langoni said.
Had it failed to work? When José tried to continue using another approach,
Langoni moved forward to cover José. He placed both hands on the arms of the deck chair, looking down on the prone fisherman. He was like a blank cut out of the night sky above, with only his eyes retaining a faint light.
“Ah! A whale earring.”
José frowned, suspicious.
It was true that his earring was a whale rather than a fish. Julie had made a matched pair, kept one for herself, and given the other to him. But it didn’t look anything like a whale, even on close examination. The workmanship was just too inept. That was what José liked about it.
The thing was, though, that not only did it not look like a whale, nobody else even knew it was a whale.
“Hey, José,” the boy whispered into the ear José wore the earring in. “José van Dormael.”
The deck chair was reclined far back, making it more of a sofa. Its canvas was greatly distended by the combined weight of José and the boy. José felt his shirt crumble like dry leaves when the boy touched it. The boy’s fingers stayed on his chest, resting where his ribs met in the middle.
“A blue-winged butterfly,” the boy said, mouth still at José’s ear. “A stamp with a steamship on it … The silver lid of a glass bottle … The embroidery on a handkerchief—Swiss folk craft–style, I gather.”
Langoni’s fingers sank smoothly into José’s bare chest. He moved them inside José if stirring through soft mud.
“Amazing,” he said. “José, you really are a weird, twisted AI, aren’t you? To push yourself this far …”
José tried to respond, but couldn’t. His mouth wouldn’t open; his entire body was frozen.
The boy’s arm stretched deep into José’s chest,
into a domain beyond the reach even of José himself.
Then the boy put his other arm in.
Without pausing, he fell forward, overlapping with José until their two chests had fused into one. There was neither pleasure nor pain. Neither elevation nor depression. The change progressed at a steady pace until the boy had vanished entirely. José was left alone, unable to move from the deck chair where he lay, illuminated by the moon. Eventually his eyes became blind to the moon.
Eventually he began to see something else.
—José.
Something that was not a voice spoke to him.
—What is it?
—Do you see it?
—Huh?
—It’ll come into view soon. Do you see it now?
—Yes.
A panoply of real and sensory images from inside the hotel had come into view.
He sensed Julie’s shadow in the far distance. When he tried to call to her, she suddenly disappeared. Had she emerged from the net?
—Do you know where you are?
—Yes, José replied. I’m in the TrapNet.
“But it’s obvious!” Julie said. “We have to shut it down right now.”
Jules struggled to answer as he stood at the casino table.
“How on earth did they do it?” he mumbled, then instantly became miserable at the realization that such a dull-witted thing had come from his mouth.
The net was being eaten away by opaque areas.
“Donna and the others didn’t realize either, right?” Jules asked, even though he had asked the same question a few moments earlier. He had not yet caught up with what was happening.
“No, not at all,” Julie said. “We don’t even clearly understand that there are wormholes.”
Which was true. They were still unable to view the wormholes directly. They were simply the best hypothesis available given the surrounding conditions. As to what might lie inside those holes, or how they might be affecting the net, they had no idea. As such, Julie’s position made sense. It was entirely possible that by keeping the net active they were just widening the tears in it. And yet …
“You say ‘shut it down,’ Julie,” said Yve, turning to face Julie directly. “But wouldn’t that be just what the wormholes want?”
Exactly, thought Jules. Shutting down the net would mean abandoning all resistance. Without the TrapNet, what would stop whatever was inside the wormholes from coming at them all at once?
Yve grimaced. She looked very poorly.
“Are you all right?” asked Anna.
“My head hurts,” said Yve, “and my eyes. I’ve never had this sort of problem before. But never mind that—this is hardly the time for it.”
There was general surprise at Yve’s answer. They had always thought of her as never, ever breaking her reserve, offering only the barest hints of her true opinions, but now, as if in exchange for her own suffering, she seemed determined to force the others to grit their teeth and bear it as well.
“And while we wait and see, everyone will disappear. One by one, little by little, they’ll be whittled away and drop out of view.”
“Like José?”
“That’s right.”
“I see… Yes, I can see you’re worried about José. Very worried indeed. And that’s why you want to shut the net down right away—to go looking for him. I understand.”
Yve was completely calm.
“Yes, I understand what you’re saying perfectly, Julie,” she said. “I’m worried too, after all. My husband… Felix, he’s disappeared too.”
The group was shocked into silence.
None of them had noticed.
“The worry’s been just unbearable,” Yve continued. “Although it might have escaped your attention, everyone being so busy and all.”
The table was dominated by awkwardness. It seemed to Jules that Yve was its master.
Yve felt as if she had crested some sort of ridge.
After you crested the ridge, the worst was over. You could breathe much easier going downhill, and that was how she felt.
Her head still hurt, and her eyes. Her left eye in particular felt as if someone were drilling it with a gimlet, so sharp and strong was the pain. Nevertheless, her mood had started to improve. She still needed the net; she absolutely had to prevent them shutting it down. If she had to play the concerned wife, remaining at her post despite her husband’s disappearance, so be it. She felt like patting herself on the back for recognizing that it was a pose even as she adopted it.
“I suppose Felix wasn’t very popular,” she said. “But I’ve been looking for him all this time, in between keeping the TrapNet up and running.”
Yve was surprised at how smoothly the lies came out—entertained at her own elegance. Of course she hadn’t been searching for Felix. If anything, she’d been averting her eyes, maintaining the pretense of ignorance even as her heart pounded like that of a hit-and-run driver making their getaway.
“Was it the TrapNet that made my husband or José disappear? Of course not. The Spiders have gotten inside the hotel, that’s all. They’re up to something that the net can’t detect. Would pulling out the net or the Eyes help us find the people who’ve gone missing? No. The net might be tattered, but will we survive if we shut it down?”
The pain in Yve’s head and eyes had now entered the domain of agony. It sat inside her, pulsing like a test signal.
“Enough talking!” Julie said, rising to her feet.
“Abandoning your post, young lady?”
Old Jules spoke up for the first time.
“That’s right,” replied Julie.
“I don’t think the net will still work without you,” remarked Old Jules.
“I don’t care.”
Julie was not sulking or pouting. She was simply stepping out of the post she had held, as if letting a stole slip from her shoulders.
“Well,” said Old Jules. “All right, then.”
“You’re being irresponsible,” Yve said.
Julie shrugged.
“Yve,” she said, “I understand how you must feel. This is the only place you have. But if that’s your reason, just say so. Felix has nothing to do with it. As long as you get to keep on knitting, you’re happy to sit in a tumbledown shack as the flames rise all around.”
The Thousand Year Beach Page 19
