by Tad Williams
"Such pleasant company," Renie muttered. "Okay, it's time. Let's go."
The great bowl-shaped valley where the giant form of the Other had lain was empty now, one side collapsed in a long, ragged edge, as though something had taken a bite out of it. Jongleur walked ahead of them all, ramrod straight, his posture and stride those of a man even younger than the middle age his looks suggested. Renie wondered if the hard-planed face was really Jongleur's own, as it had looked sometime a century or more ago. If so, it just added to one of the strangest mysteries of all—why had they wakened here with sims so much like their real bodies?
It doesn't make sense. When we first entered the network, I had the sim I'd chosen, and so did T4b and Sweet William, but Martine was just in a generic body from Atasco's simulation and !Xabbu was a baboon. What the hell was that about? And Orlando and Fredericks had their own choice of sims, avatars from their adventure game—but didn't Fredericks tell me that Orlando's sim was not quite the same as usual? Older or younger or something?
But just as their original sims showed no obvious pattern, the fact that they now wore bodies much like their own true forms seemed just as strange. Could we actually be in our real bodies? she thought wildly. But she could remember quite clearly that moment of awakening in the tank in her true physical form, and although the difference was subtle, it was a difference. The shape she now wore might look like her real body, down to small details, scars, and even the knobbiness of a knuckle she had broken in childhood, but it wasn't real at all.
So what's going on? If it's the Other's dream, why do we look like this? It's like magic. Renie blew out air, frustrated. No matter how strange and unrelated the facts seemed, there had to be patterns, but she couldn't see any of them yet.
As the small company reached the outermost pinnacles of the mountaintop, Renie noticed that Ricardo Klement had at some point joined the party, following a hundred meters or so behind them like an unquiet ghost.
The trail still curved down from the summit and along the shiny black slope, apparently all the way down into the mysteriously glinting clouds that ringed the mountain, but Renie could see that !Xabbu had not exaggerated. The striations that had made the path safe had lost much of their definition, and although the trail itself still seemed substantial, the crispness of its outer edge was gone, as though the stone were some kind of licorice ice cream that had been out of the freezer a little too long.
"I still wonder why the Other would want to bring us to a place like this," she said quietly to !Xabbu as they started down the trail after Jongleur, "And maybe to that first unfinished world, too." She couldn't help remembering how part of the ground in that other world had suddenly vanished, trapping Martine and shearing off T4b's hand. What if the same instability happened here? She decided not to waste time brooding about something she couldn't prevent.
T4b's hand, though—that was an interesting anomaly. It had been replaced by another hand, a glowing thing that had done terrible damage to one of the Grail people, who had seemed otherwise invincible. Could T4b's hand somehow have been replaced by a bit of the Other itself, or at least of its ability to shape the network? A wild-card piece of the operating system at the end of his virtual arm?
She shared the thought with !Xabbu. "But even if the Other made both of these places—carved them out of the raw material of the network, so to speak—it doesn't really tell us anything. If it's been captured or taken over or something by Dread, that might be why this particular construct is starting to lose resolution, but it doesn't explain why that other unfinished world started falling apart underneath us."
!Xabbu cut her off. "Look here. I do not remember the path being like that before." The trail in front of them was suddenly only wide enough for them to pass single file. "We should save our talking and thinking until we have found a wide place on the trail and stopped for the night."
"We're not going to sleep on this mountain, are we?" Sam protested. "It only took us a couple of hours to climb up!"
"Yes," !Xabbu told her, "but I think that was from a spot very high up the mountainside. Going down to the bottom may be a much longer trip."
"If we make it down safely," Renie said, edging past the narrow space and its much too expansive view of the sheer black mountainside below her feet, "then I won't mind if it takes a week."
Even after hours of plodding descent, they seemed no closer to the bank of white cloud. They were all tired—Renie, who had not slept, was perhaps the weariest of all. It was not surprising that an accident should happen.
They had reached one of the narrower stretches of trail, not the worst they had seen—in places they had been forced to edge sideways along the path with their backs against the hard stone of the mountainside—but slender enough that two of them could not safely stand side by side. Sam was just behind Renie; !Xabbu and Felix Jongleur were the first and second in line. Klement, who at times had trailed a long way to the rear, was now so close he could reach out and touch the last in line, which for some reason was exactly what he did.
Sam, startled and frightened by Klement's fingers trailing through her hair, lurched forward, trying to push her way past on Renie's inside shoulder. For a moment the two of them tangled; then, trying to give the girl room, Renie put her foot down too far to the outside and the edge of the trail crumbled beneath her like stale bread. For a moment Renie could only flail her arms, a reflex absolutely useless for anything except to increase the odds of dragging Sam over the side as well. Renie shrieked and then tumbled outward, aware even as her heart seemed to stop that the sight of !Xabbu's shoulder and his head turning—far too late to help—was the last of him she would ever see. Then something closed on her wrist like a manacle and she slammed down against the path with her legs dangling over nothingness, her breath smashed out in one great gasp.
In the scrambling and shouting of her companions as they struggled to drag her back over the edge, Renie did not understand until she was safe again that it was Felix Jongleur's hand that had seized her, his wiry body that had kept her from slipping away until !Xabbu and Sam could pull her back to safety.
Stretched on her stomach, blood sizzling through her head like electricity, Renie struggled to refill her lungs. Jongleur looked down on her like a scientist examining a dying lab rat. "I'm not certain I would have bothered to do it for one of your other companions," he said, then turned and continued down the path.
Despite her shock and nausea, Renie spent a long moment trying to decide how she should feel about that.
There was no darkness on the mountain, and the strange Van Gogh stars that had hung above them during their ascent did not reappear. That first journey seemed weeks behind them, but Renie thought it must have been less than forty-eight hours since she and !Xabbu and Martine and the rest had emerged from the Troy simulation onto this very trail. Now all those others were gone—vanished or dead. Out of the entire company that had been gathered by Sellars, only three were left: !Xabbu, Sam, and herself.
The climb up the mountain had been brief, but this reverse journey held the promise of being much longer. Depressed by the way the silvery distant clouds seemed to grow no closer, increasingly exhausted, they continued down the trail long past the point of safety, searching for a place to stop. An hour longer than Renie would have believed she was able to walk, they finally reached a fold in the mountainside, a deep elbow joint in the trail a few meters wide and a few meters deep where they could rest away from the cliff face. It was a bleak campsite, without food or water or even fire, since !Xabbu had found nothing anywhere that could be used as fuel, but just the chance to lie down and rest in safety seemed as good to Renie as any meal she had ever eaten. Since her near-fall she had been so frightened she would not move out of arm's reach of the mountain face, and had spent most of the last part of the descent trailing her fingers along the black stone, rubbing her skin raw to make certain that she was on the inside of the path.
Renie made Fredericks curl up at the back of t
he crevice so that she could put herself between Jongleur and the broken sword Fredericks carried, then laid her own head on !Xabbu's shoulder. Jongleur made a space for himself farther up the cut where he quickly fell asleep sitting against the stone with his chin on his chest. Klement crouched at the opening of the crevice, looking out on the gray sky, his expression quite unreadable.
Renie was asleep within seconds.
She was teetering on the edge. Stephen was only a few meters away, a dim shape floating on air currents she could not feel, as though he wore wings; for all his fluttering movements he never came within reach. She thrust her arm out as far as she could and for a moment thought she touched him, but then her footing gave way and she was falling, plunging, with nothing beneath her but shriekingly empty darkness. . . .
". . . You there? Can you . . . me? Renie?"
She fell gasping out of the dream and into a greater madness. Martine's voice was buzzing from her own breast, as though her friend were somehow trapped inside Renie's body. For a long, disoriented moment she could only stare at the black stone walls and the sliver of gray sky before she remembered where she was.
The voice hummed against her skin once more. !Xabbu sat up. Sam stared, groggy and dumbfounded. "Can . . . us? We're . . . bad shape. . . !"
"The lighter!" Renie said. "Jesus Mercy!" She fumbled the device out of the strip of cloth she wore across her chest. "It's Martine—she's alive!" But even as she lifted it up, trying to angle it into the thin light so she could see it and remember the operating sequences they had discovered, a shadow crashed against her and knocked the lighter from her hand, sent it clattering toward the back of the crevice. Felix Jongleur stood over her, fists clenched.
"What the hell are you doing?" she screamed, already scrambling on her hands and knees after the device.
". . . Answer us, Renie," Martine pleaded. Renie's hand closed on the lighter again. "We're . . . without. . . ."
"If you try to activate that," said Jongleur, "I will kill you."
Sam came up from her crouch brandishing Orlando's broken blade. "Leave her alone!"
Jongleur did not even look at her. "I am warning you," he told Renie. "Do not touch it."
Renie was frozen, irresolute. Something in Jongleur's tone told her he would do what he threatened, even with the sword buried in his back. Even so, she leaned slowly toward the lighter, fingers spread. "What's wrong with you?" she growled. "Those are our friends!"
"Martine! Is . . . you, sweetness?" said a new voice—a terrifyingly familiar one, the signal stronger than Martine's, but also slipping in and out. "I've missed . . . you have any of my other . . . with you?"
Renie snatched her hand back as though the lighter had begun to glow white-hot.
"I'm a bit busy . . . old darling, but I'll . . . some friends to find you. Don't move! They'll . . . in minutes. Actually, go . . . move if you want . . . it . . . good."
Dread's buzzing laugh filled the small space. "He's after them!" Renie almost shouted. "We have to help!"
Jongleur curled his fingers into a fist. "No."
After ten seconds had passed in strained silence, Renie reached for the device and picked it up. It seemed cold and inert now, a dead thing. "Those people are our friends," she said furiously, but Jongleur had stepped away, back toward the entrance to the crevice. !Xabbu and Sam stared at him as though he had suddenly sprouted horns and a tail. Only Klement had not moved from the place where he sat silently against the wall.
"Those people have just revealed themselves on an open communication band," Jongleur said. "They have just announced their helplessness—not to mention their position—across the entire Grail channel. But they are not the only ones with access to that channel, as you also heard. If you had tried to give away my position to him, I would have killed you without a moment's hesitation."
Renie stared, hating him, but fearful of his cruel certainty. "And why should we care about that? It's you he wants."
"All the more reason you shall not give me away."
"Really?" She was enraged now by her own cowardice. "Well, you talk big, but there are three of us and only one of you, unless you're expecting help from your idiot friend. As for Dread, he's no worse a threat to us than you are—less, because he's just an ordinary psychopath."
"Ordinary psychopath?" Jongleur lifted an eyebrow. "You know nothing. John Dread with no greater weapon than his bare hands would be one of the most dangerous people in the world, but now he has the power of my entire system at his disposal."
"All right. So he's dangerous. So now he's the little tin god of the Grail network. So what?" Renie pointed a trembling finger. "You and your selfish old friends, destroying children so you could live forever, so you could build yourself the most expensive toy in the history of the world. I hope your friend Dread does bring the whole thing down in flames, even if we go with it. It will be worth it, just to see the last of you."
Jongleur eyed her, then !Xabbu and Sam. The girl cursed under her breath and turned away, but !Xabbu held Jongleur's gaze with little expression until the older man turned back to Renie.
"Be silent and I will tell you something," he said. "I built myself a place. It does not matter what kind of place, but it was something I created for myself, separate from the Grail system. It was my respite when the stress and worry of this project became too much. A system completely removed from the Grail matrix—in fact, a dedicated system, if you know what that is."
"I know what that is," Renie said scornfully. "What's your point?"
"The point is that no one but me could access this virtual environment. Then one day, not long ago, I discovered that someone had accessed it, corrupted it, ruined what I had built there. I only realized after much consideration that the Other itself had penetrated that dedicated system—something it should not have been able to do."
He paused. Renie could make no sense out of what he was saying. "So?"
Jongleur shook his head in mock-sorrow. There was a glint in his eye; Renie realized that the monster was actually enjoying this in some strange way. "I have overestimated you again, I see. Very well, I will explain. The only way the Other could have reached into that environment is through my own system—by stealing or co-opting my own security procedures out of my house system. My personal system, not the Grail system. And now the Other is under the control of John Dread."
Renie's chill had returned. "So . . . so what you're saying is that the Other . . . isn't isolated on the Grail system anymore."
Jongleur's smile stretched his lips but went no farther. "That is correct. So while you consider where your loyalties lie, take this into your counsels. That far-from-ordinary-psychopath Dread not only has control of the most powerful and complex operating system ever developed, that system itself has already managed to reach out of its Grail Project bottle and into my house network. Which means that the Other—and Dread, as its controlling force—can reach anywhere on the global net."
He stepped out of the crevice and onto the path, turned toward the downhill slope, then paused.
"The damage Dread can do here is nothing compared to what he'll do when he discovers his new reach." Jongleur spread his hands wide. "Just imagine. The whole world will be at his fingertips—air traffic control, critical industries, stockpiles of biological weapons, nuclear launch facilities. And as you have already discovered, Johnny Dread is a very, very angry young man."
CHAPTER 2
Execution Sweet
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Sect Refuses Marker Gene for Messiah
(visual: Starry Wisdom headquarters, Quito, Ecuador)
VO: The religious sect Starry Wisdom has gone to court to gain an exemption from UN rules on marker genes in human clones. The religious group intends to clone a duplicate of their late leader, Leonardo Rivas Maldonado, but claims that the marker genes the UN mandates to separate clones from originals would compromise their religious rights.
(visual: Maria Rocafuerte, Starry Wisdom spoke
sperson)
Rocafuerte: "How can we create our loving master again in a body that is sullied by an incorrect gene? We are trying to remake the Vessel of the Living Wisdom to lead us in these final days, but the government wants us to change that vessel for the sake of obtrusive, antireligious regulations."
* * *
This is so bad, this is so bad, was all Christabel could think.
The van bumped up over the sidewalk and slowed down at the opening, so the soldier who was driving could do something with a big metal box standing there. A woman wearing a bathing suit and a robe, pushing a baby in a stroller along the walkway beside the building, was trying to look in through the van's windows, but it didn't seem like she could see Christabel at all through the glass. After a few seconds the woman turned away. The van rolled down the ramp into darkness.
Christabel knew she must have made a noise, because her daddy leaned over and said "It's just a garage, honey. Don't be afraid. Just a garage for a hotel."
They had been driving for what seemed like a long time, driving out of the town and into a place where there were more hills than houses, so that she had seen the hotel coming for a long time—a big, wide, white building that stretched high up into the air, with flags flying in front. It looked like a nice place, but Christabel did not feel good about it.
The younger soldier sitting across from them looked at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something, maybe something kind, but then his mouth got tight and he looked away. Captain Ron, who was also sitting across from them, just looked unhappy, like his stomach hurt.
Where's Mommy? she wondered. Why did she drive away in our van? Why didn't she wait for us?
To keep Mister Sellars a secret, Christabel suddenly knew. Just because her Daddy and Mommy—and this new person, Mr. Ramsey—all knew about him now didn't mean that everyone did.
