His feet began to move forward of their own accord. He had no plan at all.
One day …
That evening in the dining room back home. For just a moment, Jules connected to the memory of the man who had been there—that is, himself. He remembered.
One day …
He had made a vow.
Bathed in Souci’s boiling blood, looking Julie in the eye, he had made a vow.
One day, I vow to kill you.
Julie, don’t go any closer to José.
There’s no death there. If you reach him, you’ll never be able to die.
Jules moved forward.
Unguarded. Defenseless. Both hands at his sides.
A small Spider about the size of a man’s head leapt from Langoni’s feet and spun through the air, extending its blade-legs.
The last thing Jules’s right eye saw was his field of vision sliced in two by the gleam of the blade.
The shock of the impact. He felt as if he had taken a hatchet to the face.
I see …
Jules understood.
I see … So this is the wound that future me—Old Jules—bears.
Which means—yes—that it isn’t fatal. Jules couldn’t stop himself from smiling.
And, ignoring the gouts of blood, he took another step forward. The air itself tried to stop him, enfolding him with resistance. A rubbery weight. Langoni was controlling time again.
Please.
Please let me speak to Julie. Just one sentence. Let me explain that I came here to kill her.
I know it’ll make her smile.
Old Jules, how did you come back to meet me in the past?
How did I hack into the role of my father?
If only I knew that, I could get one step closer to her …
The water around his legs grew heavy and viscous. It became like glass. Cold, slowly flowing glass.
Jules summoned all his strength and took another step forward.
“You’ve forced my hand, Jules,” said Langoni. “You always were this way. Nothing but trouble.”
The boy turned one of his transcendental powers on Jules. The power of dissection.
Jules’s field of vision was scrambled. He could see, but he did not understand what he saw. Nor could he tell where his arms and legs were, or if they were even moving. His sense of touch, his sense of balance, the power that kept him a united self weakened and began to fade. Langoni was tampering with the sense of bodily integration that unified the countless modules making up a single AI.
Jules’s will alone took him another step forward.
And then he reached up with his left hand to cover his lost eye.
He been holding Cottontail in that hand because… yes, because on some level he remembered Yve talking about how Glass Eyes gave her her sight. His gesture had been meant to restore his lost eye. He had hoped, subconsciously, to regain his vision.
And then
into the gaping, ragged wound
as if swallowed, as if inhaled, as if poured …
went Cottontail.
The Eye adjusted its form smoothly as a quicksilver egg, slipping into Jules’s shattered eye socket, then going further, passing his identity barrier and plunging into his deepest depths.
His senses, minutely partitioned due to Langoni’s tampering, were reunited—and more.
The microvibrations his concussion had sent through his awareness stilled.
Like a sea becalmed from horizon to horizon.
Like a grassy plain across which no wind blew.
For that moment, for that moment alone, Jules Tappy’s personae were united perfectly.
Each persona shared its secrets perfectly with all the others.
So this is me.
Everything and everything was revealed to him, as if he were surveying the scenery under cloudless skies.
He was granted this perspective by Cottontail, who had seen everything first and showed it to him now.
It was a vast, wide world.
Driftglass.
The word arrived like a proclamation, clear and whole.
He felt omnipotent.
Jules advanced.
Everything was plain and simple. His step was light. Langoni’s time barriers were riddled with careless security holes, and Jules Tappy’s right eye saw them all. Langoni himself now seemed but a powerless boy to him, and Jules walked past him with ease.
His eyes faced forward, but he saw Langoni’s alarm behind him too. It seemed only natural to Jules, in his current state, to see countless overlaid viewpoints.
And then he saw Julie before him, bent forward over José.
Time flowed as if now restored. Julie’s time synchronized with his own.
Julie turned to face him. “Sorry to be so stubborn,” she said.
“Julie … You know you can’t die here?”
Julie nodded lightly.
So she already knew. Nevertheless, Jules continued, giving voice to what they both already knew.
“Any further and your final step toward death—your final moment of life—will only be infinitely extended. It’ll be just like the Realm of Summer. Worse, even. You don’t need to go there.”
“I know.” Julie said simply. “But I made a promise. José and I both did. To die together … It was long ago, now.”
“Is that promise so unbreakable? Don’t you think José would prefer it if you did?” An awful, rotten argument. You may as well just push her away right now, Jules scolded himself. “You won’t even be keeping it if you do go on. You can’t die here.”
“I know that. But I have to stay with José until we can die together. Soon the glass will seal this place up too. It’ll be filled with another time. If I’m not in it, I’ll never see José again. I want to help him die, really die, one day. I can’t do that without staying with him. Sharing his time, forever.”
Julie laid her body down on the mass of blocks as she spoke.
Langoni would be so happy to hear what she was saying, Jules thought. But he saw no way to dissuade her.
Even if we only feel what the Realm’s designers put into us, we still feel it. Our feelings are precious and true to us. I love Julie the same way. Helplessly. I can’t hold any of it against her.
I mean, I love her too much to. What else is there to say?
“I’ve always loved you, Julie.” My sister. “So much.”
Julie smiled and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I knew. And I loved you too. Much, much more than José.”
Jules didn’t speak.
And then, suddenly, painfully, a longing ran through him, so powerful it seemed it would break him in two.
A longing to see that Julie of long ago, on her birthday.
To be in that dining room, sun pouring in like molten iron, exchanging gazes of pure white that reached the deepest places in each other like thin, cruel blades. When he had donned the mask of his father, Julie had finally seen him instead of running.
I see … So that’s why I hacked the role. Because I decided to, right here and right now. I must go back in time after this, probably using this flowing Glass somehow …
“Thank you for everything,” Julie said. “All this time.”
“You’re welcome,” said Jules. “And thank you. All this time …” said Jules. “A thousand years was maybe overdoing it.”
Julie giggled.
“You aren’t allowed to forget about me, okay?” she said. “There’ll be surprises in store. Probably. That’s a promise.”
But then she hurriedly shook her head.
“No … I shouldn’t say that. I take it back. Forget about me. You’re free. Go anywhere you like.”
And so saying, with a peaceful expression,
rubbing the short, soft hair
at the nape of her neck like she always did,
Julie disintegrated.
In an instant, she had crumbled into a pile of minute, colorful tiles. Into pixels.
She had been holding on all this time.
The agony that had driven José’s disintegration had long since gotten inside her.
But she had borne it. With a smile.
To be honest, though, she had borne it ever since the Realm first came online. She had done enough.
Julie’s blocks tumbled down as smoothly as a collapsing mound of sand, clattering onto José’s blocks below and thoroughly mingling with them.
As if intentionally making it impossible to separate the two of them.
One day … To keep her promise to José, Julie had plunged into a long, long sleep whose warp and weft were pain itself.
Her last words were—yes, they were the same as the ones she had said to that dragonfly.
They crunched on the sand.
Jules Tappy’s feet.
He trod the vast, smoothly undulating beach, his steps crunching as he descended toward the water.
The beach was like a vast dune. Endless white sands without a single footprint besides his own.
The sky was pitch-black.
The sound of waves in the distance was like the fizz of a small glass of soda. Weak. Uncertain. It sounded as if it would soon vanish.
Vanish? What would? The sea?
Where had the sea been? In the Realm of Summer. Of course.
Yes. The Realm of Summer still remained, or at least the stage on which it had taken place.
The sands. The sea. Faint starlight. And Jules.
He was still scheming. Still planning.
For the objects left behind.
The great temple of pain was already gone from this world. Langoni had carried it off to wherever the trap was to be set. Another Realm, perhaps.
It had been a sideways sliding sensation, something that flowed past him for just a minute, with no sound or wind. Everything had been carried out, but the sands, the sound of the ocean, the starlight, and Jules had been left behind. Before he realized it, he was standing alone on a gray dune.
A few unwanted bits and pieces had also come loose from the temple and fallen as it went. Things that no one would give a second glance to, worth less than the packing straw in a toy’s wooden box.
Jules had been one of them.
Not far away, he had found Anne’s remains lying on the sand.
Her long limbs had been sprawled in all directions, and her body had petrified into crumbling rock. Jules had tried to close her wide-open eyes for her, but gave up when he realized that the thin mineral flakes her eyelids had become might come off entirely if he forced them. Anne’s magnificent, powerful body had retained its shape, but giving it an experimental push he had found that it was as light as a dried fish. This lightness had brought tears to his eyes, for some reason. Perhaps because it had called to his mind the feelings Anne must have hugged close to her chest all that time. Something fragile, a small sheaf of paper, had fallen out of her clothing when he had moved her. It had looked like a book, but it had also looked on the verge of crumbling away, so he had tucked it back in her breast without opening it.
He had scraped the surrounding sand over her body to bury her. Atop the gently sloping grave mound he had placed a gleaming, whale-shaped earring. When the sliding sensation had come not long before, he had grabbed at the altar of glass and found the earrings rolling on top. Why had they still been there? Because they were no longer necessary, he supposed. The two lovers had found something to replace them. So what harm would it do if Jules kept one and gave Anne the other?
The corpses of other AIs that had fallen from the temple lay whitely scattered here and there on the beach as well.
Jules had made the rounds, burying each one in sand. It hadn’t taken long.
Once he was finished, he had nothing else to do whatsoever.
And that was when Jules had set out toward the sound of the waves.
He could not see the ocean yet. He walked on, thinking about what was inside his head.
He no longer felt as if everything was firmly within his grasp.
The sense that the multiple personae within him had joined together perfectly into a seamless whole had also slipped through his fingers. All he had now was cold, bland, blunt sensation. The kind of rawness that comes from overexertion, like puffy eyes after a late night.
Cottontail was now nowhere to be found. That sensation of pouring in—had it really happened? His memories were vague on this score.
Jules brought his hand to his face, finding a scar like a poorly mended crack in porcelain there. He could think of no reason other than Cottontail for the devastating wound to already have healed and scarred over. So that part had been real. He had come at least far enough into the future to receive the scar that Old Jules bore. But apart from the wound, he was still a twelve-year-old boy. It would surely be a long time yet before he aged as much as Old Jules had.
A gentle wind blew. It was pleasantly cool. The cool of the minutes just before dawn?
Was there to be another dawn?
He advanced farther still.
Letting the sand crunch under his feet as he went.
He was unusually aware of the sound of his footsteps, perhaps because he was wondering if he mightn’t hear the Sound come back to him.
He still held out hope that the Singing Sands might yet live.
That was why he was heading toward the sea.
The sound of the waves was closer now.
Cresting a small dune, he saw a long, gentle slope descend before him. Beyond the slope spread the black surface of the ocean.
Buried in the sand were two bicycles, rusted beyond use.
They had to be the ones that he and Julie had ridden that morning… No, yesterday morning. But they looked like they had weathered decades of exposure to the elements.
If those were the bicycles, the steep cliffs should be just beyond here, but he didn’t see them anywhere. The very lay of the land had become featureless and flat. And the sea was supposed to come right up to the hotel, in any case. Had the Singing Sands simply vanished? Or were the cliffs still standing somewhere else, with the bicycles ending up here by chance? Jules decided to advance a little farther, down to the waterline.
“And where are we off to today? With a girl, too! Can’t leave you alone for a second.”
Where was it that Old Jules had called those words to him?
“… Alone for a second,” he heard a voice say.
Jules stopped in his tracks.
“… Alone for a second.” It was Old Jules’s voice, from that very encounter.
Jules trod in place. Crunch, crunch.
“And where are we off to today? With a girl, too!”
The Sound billowed from beneath his feet like dust.
All it was doing was reflexively playing back what it could sample from Jules’s memory. Even so, there was no mistake: this was the Sound of the Singing Sands. Some trace of them, however small, had survived here. Jules broke into a run and loped toward the sea, kicking up babbling fragments of Sound with every stride. As the water drew nearer, the Sound of his running grew more vivid and talkative. It spread in crisscrossing waves. It whirled and spiraled.
The waves lapped at his feet. Peaceful waves, almost without sound.
A severely damaged, rotting wooden boat had washed up on the shore from who knew where. The waves foamed through the gaps in its broken timbers.
He was at a dead end. Unless he crossed the ocean.
Everything started right here …
It seemed to be the Old Jules part inside his head thinking this. The old man was trying to convey his experiences, his memories to Jules.
But what did
he mean by “everything”?
Their invasion by the Spiders and Langoni?
Jules traveling backward in time to hack his father?
Perhaps Old Jules’s own wanderings? Whatever long, long journey had aged him (me) so?
Or …
Or …
Let me guess what you’re worried about, said Old Jules. The last thing Julie said to you. What did she mean by it? Was it just the first thing that came into her head to get you to leave? Julie, of all people, would never do that.
A new promise.
Let me guess what you’re thinking, said Old Jules. I know without being told.
Is this really a dead end?
Is there nothing beyond the sea?
That’s it, right? That’s what you’re thinking.
Now let me guess what you’re brooding on, said Old Jules.
The Singing Sands.
Driftglass.
Just what are they?
“And where are we off to today?”
Old Jules was standing beside him.
The sea breeze ruffled the old man’s thin white hair. This had to be an image created by the Singing Sands, created based on information on Old Jules read from Jules himself. His intense concentration must have attracted the interest of the Sands.
“You know where I go next, don’t you?” he asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. It’d be impossible for any one person to observe both my wake and yours. So who cares? Hurry up and set sail.”
“You’re staying here?”
“That’s right. I’ve finally made my way back to the Singing Sands, after all. I was starting to worry I might never be restored. I think I’ll stay in this form for now. My existence is completely dependent on these sands, you know. Has been since the first time I appeared before you. You only ever saw me near the ocean, right?”
“Oh,” Jules said, nodding. Then he thought again. “But you were in the Mineral Springs Hotel too.”
“Of course I was. Use your head. What made it possible for me to exist there? Isn’t it obvious?”
Jules nodded. It was a riddle he had asked himself, so naturally he knew the answer. “That means that the Singing Sands and the Glass Eyes are the same type of thing, after all. But what type of thing is that?”
The Thousand Year Beach Page 30
