by Tad Williams
Confronted with her friend's empty shell, Sam was crying again. "He is dead, isn't he? I keep wanting it not to be true, but that's probably how everyone feels, right?"
Renie recalled the achingly bleak months after her mother's death. "Yes, it is. You'll be seeing him, hearing him, only he won't be there. But it gets better after a while."
"It'll never get better. Never." Sam leaned down to touch Orlando's stony cheek. "But he is dead, isn't he? Really, really dead."
Renie was finding it almost as difficult as Sam to contemplate leaving behind a body that still looked so full of life. There had been other strange signs too. Unlike all the other sims she had seen whose living owners had died, Orlando's garments had remained soft and supple despite the marble-like solidity of the body beneath. This strange state of affairs had even made Renie wonder for a while if he might not still be living, just lost somehow in his own deep coma back in real life, but numerous surreptitious experiments—performed when Sam was otherwise distracted so as not to raise her hopes—had made Renie as certain as she could ever be in this strange place that there was no animation left in that petrified form.
Orlando's last gift to them had allowed Renie and Sam to salvage enough cloth to make crude garments, which helped Renie feel a little less vulnerable in the presence of the cold-eyed Jongleur and the vacantly childish Klement. In turning over Orlando's stiffened sim to untangle the remains of his tattered chiton, they had even found his broken sword, the hilt still bearing a few inches of blade, which had made it much easier to turn the dirty white fabric into loincloths and crude bandeau tops.
The damaged sword was the only weapon among the mountaintop survivors, perhaps the only weapon in this entire simworld, and obviously far too valuable a tool to leave behind. Renie would have preferred to carry it herself, trusting her own wariness to keep it from falling into Jongleur's hands, but Sam had been so pathetically grateful to have some keepsake from Orlando that Renie had not had the heart to argue very much; Sam now wore it thrust through the waist of her loincloth. With only a bit more than a hand's breadth of blade left, it would not make much of a weapon, although it had given Renie a nasty scratch on her leg while she and Sam had been wrestling. Still, she had to admit that in such spare circumstances the shattered blade had the look of a legendary object.
Renie shook her head, irritated at herself for getting mystical. Undecaying body or not, their friend was still dead. Orlando's sword might once have been the scourge of an imaginary gaming world, but now it would be used for digging or for sawing wood . . . if they ever found any. As for the miraculous cloth, it had been turned into a pair of primitive bikinis from a bad caveman flick. (!Xabbu had refused to take any of the tiny amount of fabric to clothe his own nakedness, and when Renie had offered some to Jongleur, more to protect her and Sam's own sensibilities than as a kindness, he had only laughed.)
So we'll head down the mountain this way, she thought. Three naked men and two women looking like something out of a Neandertal lingerie advertisement. And for all we know, we're the only people left alive in this whole virtual universe . . . except for Dread. Oh, yes, we're in great shape. . . .
!Xabbu took the new stones they had collected, but he seemed distracted. Before asking him why, Renie made sure Jongleur was out of earshot. The master of the Grail Brotherhood stood some distance away, staring out into the weirdly depthless sky from the rim of the cliff. Renie couldn't help wondering again what it would feel like to shove him over the edge.
"You look worried," she told !Xabbu as he shored up the walls around Orlando's body. "How are we supposed to cover the top of this, by the way?"
"I am worried because I do not think we have time to do that. I think we must leave Orlando's grave this way and begin our journey soon. I am sorry—I wanted to do better."
"What are you talking about?"
"We have all seen what has happened to this place just since we have been here—how things are losing their edges, their color. While I was out looking for more stones, I discovered something that worried me. The trail is losing truth, too."
She shook her head, confused. "What do you mean?"
"Maybe I have used the wrong word. I am talking of the trail which we climbed to come here, with Martine and Paul Jonas and the others, before everything became so strange—the trail along the mountainside. It is changing as everything else here is changing, Renie, but there was not much . . . what is the word? There was not much truth, much . . . reality to it in the first place. Already it looks old and blurry."
Despite the permanent room-temperature ambience, Renie felt a chill. Without that path they would be trapped on top of a miles-high mountain that was rapidly losing its coherence. And what if gravity was the last thing to go?
"You're right. We leave soon." She turned to Sam, who was brooding over Orlando's empty sim. "Did you hear that? We're running out of time here."
The girl was dry-eyed now, but the composure did not go very deep. It was still strange for Renie to see Sam's true face. It had been even stranger to discover that Sam had a black father, and a distinct African look to her features despite her tawny hair. Her teenage dialect had been so compellingly middle-American that even Renie herself had unconsciously typed the girl (even when everyone had still thought her a boy) as white. "He still looks so . . . perfect," Sam said quietly. "What's going to happen to him if this place goes away?"
Renie shook her head. "I don't know. But remember, that's not him, Sam. That's not even his body. Wherever Orlando is, he must be in a better place than this."
"We need a little rest before we go anywhere," !Xabbu said. "We have none of us slept since the night before Troy was destroyed, and that seems a long time ago. It will be no help to hurry down the mountain if we are not making good choices—if we stumble and fall because we are so tired."
Renie started to object, but of course he was right: they were all exhausted—in fact, it was !Xabbu himself who usually got the least sleep and insisted on taking the most strenuous duties. It might only be a sim and not his true body, but he was still sagging with weariness. Even Sam's emotional volatility, unsurprising after what they had all been through, might be improved with rest.
"Okay," she said. "We'll take a few hours to sleep. But only if you go first."
"I am used to being without sleep, Renie. . . ."
"I don't care if you're used to it. It's your turn. I'll stand first watch, then I'll wake Sam up for the second. So just lie down, will you?"
!Xabbu shrugged and smiled. "If you say so, Beloved Porcupine."
"Stop that." She looked around. "It would be nice if it ever got dark here." She remembered the terror of sudden nightfall in the other unfinished land. "Well, maybe not. Anyway, just close your eyes."
"You could sleep too, Renie."
"And not have anyone keeping an eye on Jongleur? Chance not, as the young people say."
!Xabbu curled up on the ground. Trained by his nomadic people to snatch the opportunity when it was available, within moments his breathing slowed and his muscles relaxed.
Renie reached out once and touched his hair, still awed to have the old !Xabbu back again. Or a virtual version of him. She glanced at Felix Jongleur, still staring out into the sky like a ship's captain watching the weather, then at Sam, crouched silently beside Orlando's cairn. Although her knee was touching Renie's leg, the girl seemed farther away than Jongleur.
"You get some sleep too," Renie told her. "Sam? Do you hear me?"
The girl looked up, a flash of anger on her face. "You're not my mother, seen?"
Renie sighed. "No, I'm not. But I am a grown woman and I'm trying to help. And if you ever want to see that mother of yours again, you must stay alert and healthy."
Sam's look softened. "Sorry. Sorry I'm being so stupid. I just . . . I want this all to be over. I want to go home."
"We're doing our best. Lie down for a while, even if you don't sleep."
"Chizz." She stretched out beside O
rlando's body and closed her eyes, one hand touching the low stone wall. It gave Renie a superstitious shiver to see it.
I can't even remember, she thought, what it felt like when life was normal.
Both !Xabbu and Sam were still sleeping soundly after something like an hour had passed, as deeply as her brother Stephen had used to sleep after a long day of childish hyperactivity. Sam was snoring quietly, and Renie was reluctant to wake her up. She felt a brief desire for a cigarette, and realized with surprise that it had been a long time since she had thought about smoking.
Just too damned busy trying not to get killed, she decided. Effective, but there must be easier ways to quit.
Jongleur had his back against a rock some ten meters away and appeared to be sleeping himself, or at least his head was sunk on his chest and his eyes were closed. Renie could not help thinking he looked like a vulture waiting with the patience of millions of years of blind evolution for something to die. The fifth member of the involuntary fellowship, Ricardo Klement, had not reappeared, and even though it disturbed Renie to think about him trudging around the mountaintop, God only knew what kind of thoughts flickering through his damaged brain, it was better than having to look at him.
It was the mountaintop itself that now caught Renie's attention. For all that had happened here, for all that she and !Xabbu had worried about its ongoing dissolution, she had not really looked it over very carefully. Sleepless in the eternal, directionless light, she let her gaze wander across the spiky terrain.
The mountain was not only losing detail, it was losing color as well—or, since it had originally been all the same shiny black material, it might have been more precise to say it was gaining colors. The scumble of dark, unreflective soil beneath her had not changed too much, but the uneven peaks and pillars of stone were less solidly black, as though someone had thrown water on an ink drawing before it was entirely dry. Some of the spikes of rock had merely lightened to dark gray, but others now showed threads of other hues, purples and nightsky blues, and even the suggestion here and there of a dark brown like dried blood.
But that doesn't really make any sense, Renie told herself. That's not how virtual landscapes decay. If they don't just go nonfunctional, then some of the components might work longer than others and you get an odd effect like a schematic or a wire-frame after all the other detail is gone, but you don't just have color wash out. Things don't go blurry. It's crazy.
But here they were, and what hadn't been crazy since they'd first crossed with the old hacker Singh into this virtual madhouse of a universe? Nothing here behaved as normal code should behave.
Renie squinted. The mountaintop seemed quite real—in some ways more so than when they had first come—but there was no question that the place was losing coherence. Some of the jutting spikes were little more than blobs now, and in other places the canyons that cut into the rim of the valley had begun to sag along the edges like pudding.
It's not a real landscape—in fact, it never was. The more she looked at its sparse verticality and blurry gray sky, dead as a bad piece of theater scenery, the more it seemed like something purely of the imagination. An Expressionist painting, perhaps. A cartoon. A dream.
Yes, that's what it truly looks like, she thought. And that's what the other unfinished place looked like too. Not like real places, but like one of those landscapes that the brain throws out as a backdrop for a dream.
A thought suddenly came to her, something as strange and prickly as static electricity, and she found herself sitting up straight. After a few minutes, with other ideas grabbing onto the first as though magnetized, she badly wanted to share. She gave !Xabbu a gentle shake. He came awake immediately.
"Renie? Is it my turn? Is everything. . . ?"
"I'm fine, I just . . . I had an idea. Because of what you always say. A dream is dreaming us, you know?"
"What do you mean?" He drew himself up until he could look closely at her face.
"You always say that a dream is dreaming us, right? And I always thought of that as being, I don't know, philosophical."
"He laughed quietly. "Is that a bad word, Renie?"
"Don't make fun of me, please. I'm admitting my own faults. I'm an engineer, for God's sake—or at least that's my training. I tend to think of things like philosophy as being what you do after the real work is finished."
The look he gave her was amused, crinkling around the eyes. "And so?"
"I was just thinking about this place and how much like a dream it is. How nothing is quite normal, but in a dream that doesn't matter because you're waiting for something important to happen. And then I suddenly just thought, what if this place is a dream?"
!Xabbu cocked his head. "What do you mean?"
"Not a dream, really, but strange and unreal for the same reason that a dream is. Why is it that things happen all funny in dreams, things look funny? That nothing is ever quite . . . complete? Because your subconscious isn't actually very good at recreating the stuff the conscious mind usually sees, or else it just doesn't care."
Sam stirred in her sleep, disturbed by the urgency in Renie's tone, so she dropped her voice to a whisper. "I think the Other built this place. I think it meant us to come here, and it built this place out of its own mind, like a dream. What did Jonas call it? A metaphor." Spoken aloud, it did not seem as obviously true. It was hard to conceive of their own existence having any importance to that vast, suffering figure.
"Made this from its mind? But if this Other runs the system, then it has access to anything—all of those worlds, each one perfect." !Xabbu frowned, thinking. "It seems strange it should build anything so unreal."
"But that's just it," Renie said excitedly. "It didn't build those other worlds. Those were made by people—programmers, engineers, real people who know what a real world is supposed to look like, and how to make even an imaginary world look real. But what does the Other know? It's just an artificial intelligence of some kind, right? It sees patterns, but it's not a human. It doesn't know what would seem real to us and what wouldn't, just the general shape of things. It would be like giving a book to a very intelligent child who can't read, then telling him, "Now you make one of these books for yourself." The kid might have all the right letters to use from the one you gave him, but he couldn't make them into a story. So it would be a weird thing that just looked like a book. Get it?"
!Xabbu thought about it for a long moment. "But why? Why would the Other create a new world?"
"I don't know. Maybe just for us. Martine said she'd met it before, remember? That she'd been part of an experiment with it when she was a girl? Suppose the thing recognized her. Or maybe for some reason it just wanted to see what we were. This is an alien intelligence we're talking about, so who knows? It might be artificial, but it seems to be a lot more complex than any ordinary neural net."
Renie sensed something at her shoulder and turned. Felix Jongleur stood over them, his face hardened in a frown. "We have waited long enough. It's time to begin our descent. Wake the girl."
"We were just. . . ."
"Wake her. We are leaving now."
Ordinarily, faced with a naked middle-aged man, Renie would have been only too happy to keep her eyes on his face, but it was surprisingly difficult to meet Jongleur's cold gaze. Now that the first heat of her rage at the man had begun to dissipate she was discovering an uncomfortable fact: he frightened her badly. He had a deep, hard strength, the kind of unbending core that served nothing but its own will. His dark eyes showed not an iota of human concern, but there was nothing animalistic in them—rather, he seemed a creature that had moved past simple humanity. She had heard politicians and financial titans described as implacable, as forces of nature, and she had always seen it as just a flattering metaphor. Now, faced with the master of the Grail in person, she was beginning to understand that a black charisma like his owed nothing to artistic descriptions.
She darted a look at !Xabbu, but her friend's thoughts were hidden: when he chos
e to be, he was just as inscrutable in his own skin as he had been behind the mask of the baboon sim.
Jongleur turned his back on them and moved a few paces away, the picture of impatience controlled. Renie leaned over and nudged Sam Fredericks awake.
"We have to go, Sam."
The girl roused herself slowly. She crouched for a moment, then her eyes swung to Orlando's body lying in its close-fitting coffin of stones.
"!Xabbu," Renie whispered. "Go bother Jongleur for a minute so Sam can say goodbye to her friend. Ask the old bastard some questions—not that he'll give you any answers, but it will keep him busy."
!Xabbu nodded. He walked to Jongleur and said something, then swept his arm out toward the pearly, horizonless sky, exactly like someone discussing the weather or the view. Renie turned back to Sam.
"We have to leave him behind now."
The girl nodded. "I know," she said quietly, staring down at Orlando. "He was so good. Not just nice—sometimes he was kind of hardcase, majorly sarcastic. But he really wanted . . . w–wanted to be g–g–good. . . ."
Renie put an arm around her. There was nothing to be done, really.
"Goodbye, Orlando," Renie said at last, quietly. "Wherever you are." She led Sam away from the cairn, fussing at the girl's hair and ragged garments to distract her. "You'd better get your brain-damaged friend," she told Jongleur, "because he's wandering around out there somewhere. We're leaving now."
Something even darker and colder than usual moved across the man's face. "You think I should go fetch Klement as though he were some schoolyard chum of mine? You are a fool. I need the three of you, so we will all go together, but I see no such use for him. If he wants to join us, then I will not stop him—unless he does something that endangers my safety—but if he stays here instead while this place reverts to raw code, it matters little to me."
He turned and strode away toward the trail down the mountain, making himself the leader by default.
