Sea of Silver Light

by Tad Williams

  It's a sim of . . . me, she realized, even as she stepped out into the great chamber.

  The rush of muttering voices rose around her. A thousand people, maybe more, were kneeling on the floor of the massive room, their rhythmic, whispering chant rising to the distant ceiling. Oil lamps burned in niches all along the walls, making everything flicker like some visual recording from the earliest days of technology. A clear space between the huddled bodies led across the pale marble; none of the bent figures even looked up as Dulcie walked past them.

  At the far end of the chamber a silent, motionless figure sat enthroned on a dais like a statue in a pagan temple, a long silver rod clutched in its hand. The creature was larger than a man, and although its body was human-shaped, the skin was absolutely black and as glossy as Chinese lacquer. The snouted, prong-eared head was that of some doglike beast.

  As she neared the dais the whispering voices dropped into silence. The dog-creature's head was lowered, eyes hooded as if in sleep, muzzle against the massive chest, and she had begun to think it really was a statue when the great yellow eyes fluttered open.

  All the kneeling shapes suddenly bellowed in perfect unison: "Cheers, Dulcie!" The room thundered with echoes, covering the sound of her startled shriek. "You're looking damn nice today," they added, loud as artillery fire, toneless as a punch press.

  Silence fell again as she took a staggering step to maintain her balance. The thing on the dais stood up, rising to almost ten feet, and the muzzle gashed open in a long-toothed leer. "Like it? Just my way of saying 'Welcome!' "

  I wonder if you can wet yourself in VR. Aloud, she said, "That's just charming. Took a few years off my life."

  "What do you want from the Lord of Life and Death—flowers? Singing and dancing? Well, that can be arranged, too." He lifted the silver rod and a fluttering snow of rose petals began to descend from the roof. With a great scraping and murmuring, the thousands of shaven-headed priests rose from their kneeling positions and began clumsily to dance. "Any particular music you'd like?"

  "I don't want anything." Dulcie looked up through the flurrying petals, trying to ignore the disturbing spectacle of a thousand blank-eyed, sandaled priests doing a spastic soft-shoe. "What the hell is this place?"

  "It's the Old Man's home away from home." He waved, and the priests lowered themselves to the floor once more. The last few rose petals were still drifting down. "His favorite simulation—Abydos, I think it's called. Ancient Egypt."

  It was more than a little disturbing to be carrying on a conversation with a jackal-headed man almost twice her own height, like something from a game or interactive theater. "The old man—you mean your . . . employer, right? And who are you supposed to be? Sparky the Wonder Dog?"

  He showed her his teeth again. "This is the sim I always wore here. Of course, I was taking orders then, and now I'm the one giving them." He lifted his voice. "Roll over! Play dead!" The priests dropped to their bellies, rotated once, then lay motionless with their knees and elbows in the air. "It's amusing, in a sort of way, especially when I think how much it would piss the old wanker off." He gestured to one of the nearest priests, who leaped to his feet and scuttled to the dais. Dulcie stared at the sim curiously. He certainly looked like a real person, right down to the gleam of sweat on his shaved head. "This is Dulcie," Dread told the priest. "You love her. She is your goddess."

  "I love her," the priest intoned, although he did not look at the object of his newfound affection. "She is my goddess."

  "Would you do anything for her?"

  "I would, Lord."

  "Then show her how much you love her. Go on."

  The priest struggled to his feet—he was one of the fat, middle-aged variety, and a bit short of breath—and waddled to one of the wall niches. As Dulcie watched with growing horror, the priest snatched out the oil lamp and upended its contents over his head; in a moment he was running with flames. His white robe caught and blazed up. His round head seemed to float in a halo of fire. "I love you, my goddess," he croaked even as his features began to blacken.

  "Oh my God, stop, put him out, stop!" she screamed.

  Dread swung his long-muzzled face toward her in surprise, then lifted his rod. The blazing figure disappeared. All the other priests still lay on their backs like dead locusts in a field. "Christ, girl, they're only code."

  "I don't care," she said. "That doesn't mean I want to see something like that."

  The jackal shape vanished, leaving the real Dread, ordinary size and dressed all in loose-fitting black, standing on the top step of the throne. "Didn't mean to upset you, sweetness." He sounded more annoyed than contrite.

  "I just. . . ." She shook her head. "What's going on here, anyway? You said this was the . . . Old Man's place. Where is he? What have you been doing since you got into the system?"

  "Oh, this and that." His human grin was only slightly less feral. "I'll explain more later, but first I want to take you on a little tour. Just for fun."

  "I don't want to watch any more burning priests, thank you."

  "There's lots of things more interesting to see than that." He raised his hand in the air and the silver rod abruptly shrank to a small silver cylinder. "Let's go."

  "That's the lighter!" she said. "What. . . ?" But the high hall of Abydos-That-Was and its thousand patient priests had already vanished.

  It was indeed a tour. From their first stop in the streets of Imperial Rome, complete with the shouts of street vendors and the wind off the Tiber rank with the scents of human sweat and urine, Dread moved Dulcie in short order to sweltering afternoon on an African plain inhabited by strange creatures as large as elephants, but which Dulcie had never seen before, and then in quick succession through the plum-treed gardens of some clearly mythical China, to a cliffside position overlooking a waterfall a mile or more high, and at last to the white weirdness of the ultimate north, where the convulsing Aurora Borealis hung over their heads like a fireworks show stuck on extra slow speed.

  "My God," she said, watching her breath hang as vapor in the air, "it's staggering! I mean, I knew there were a lot of simworlds—we saw quite a few through the Quan Li sim, but. . . ." She shivered, mostly out of reflex. Due to some wrinkle in the simworld, or to Dread's control of it, the temperature here felt no cooler than an early spring evening. "And you can just go anywhere. . . ?"

  "Go anywhere, do anything." His grin was now only half a smile, the expression of the proverbial canary-catching cat. He rolled the lighter in his fingers. "I won't need this much longer. And you can do whatever you want too, if you behave yourself and keep me happy."

  She felt a tingle of warning. "What does that mean, exactly. . . ?"

  "Do your job. Stay out of trouble." He paused to stare at her in a way that made her squirmingly uncomfortable. It was almost as though the attempted incursions into his hidden storage had appeared on her forehead like stigmata. "You have no idea what I've got going here."

  She looked out at the endless ice fields, the northern lights shimmering. "But what about your employer? Where did he go? How is it that you have access to everything. . . ?" Nearby, a piece of ice the size of a football field groaned and shifted, lifting a jagged edge above the permafrost and tipping the entire plate on which Dulcie and Dread stood. She grunted in fear, staggered, and put her hand on Dread's arm for support.

  He opened his eyes wide. "You don't have to worry," he said, although he seemed to be enjoying her discomfiture. "Even if you get killed here, you'll just drop offline. We're the only people left with on-and-off access."

  "What about the owners? What are they called, the Grail people?"

  He shrugged. "Things have changed a bit."

  "And you can control the system? You can make things happen?"

  He nodded. He seemed as pleased as a child, and Dulcie realized that just like a child, he was anxious to show off. "Anything you'd like to see?"

  "Have you let those other people off the network, then?"

  "Other
people. . . ?"

  "The ones we were traveling with—Martine, T4b, Sweet William. If you can control the access to the network, you should be able to set them free. . . ." She realized suddenly that she missed them. After living with them day in and day out for weeks, she knew them better than she knew most of the people in her real life. They had been so miserable, so frightened and trapped. . . .

  Dread's blank look had become something even deeper and more distant. She pulled at his sleeve. "You are going to set them loose, aren't you?" When he did not answer, she tugged again. He snatched his arm away with a quick violence that almost yanked her off her feet.

  "Shut up," he snapped. "Someone's using the main broadcast channel."

  As she watched, in a white world silent but for the deep shifting of ice, his lips moved minutely as he subvocalized to the invisible someone. A slow smile stretched his face. He seemed to say something else, then his fingers flicked momentarily across the lighter. He turned to her slowly, eyes bright.

  "Sorry about that. Something I'll have to see to later." He nodded. "What were you saying?"

  "About the others—the ones the Grail had trapped online."

  "Ah, yes. As a matter of fact, I've just been too busy to see to Martine and the rest. But I'll be getting to them directly. You're right—I need to deal with them." He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his curious elation had been banked like the coals in a fire. "Come along—we've got one more thing to see."

  Before she had time even to open her mouth the polar icecaps had dissolved and the two of them were hovering in midair above a vast and unbroken expanse of ocean. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, scalloping the wave-tops in brassy light, but otherwise there was nothing to see for miles, not even seabirds.

  "What's this. . . ?" she began, but he flicked up his hand, demanding quiet.

  They hung above the endless green for long moments, then Dulcie saw that the pattern of the waves was beginning to change just before them, the regular crisscross of breakers churning into something more chaotic. As she watched, openmouthed, the churn became a great boiling, the waves lifting into plumes dozens, perhaps, even hundreds of meters tall, flinging gobbets of froth into the air. Then, like the nose cone of a missile launched from some inconceivably huge submarine, the first tower top pierced the surface of the angry seas.

  It lasted over an hour. For most of that time Dulcie was aware of nothing but the unfolding spectacle before her. The city heaved up from the waters with a surging roar, as though the earth itself were painfully giving birth—the spires of its tallest buildings first, tangled in great ropes of kelp, the walls of the citadel following closely behind, their armor of barnacles glittering wetly as they emerged into the sun. When the citadel had breasted, water sluicing down its roofs and walls before thundering into the ocean, turning the waters into white foam as far as she could see, the mountain and the rest of its clinging city arose, the drowned streets gleaming as they came back into the light.

  When it was over, and the monstrous empty husk of island Atlantis had returned from the depths, Dread slipped his arm companionably around her shivering shoulders and leaned close to her ear.

  "Play your cards right, sweetness," he whispered, "and someday all of this will be yours." He reached down and patted her on the buttocks. "I'll even dry it off for you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a few loose ends to deal with. Just keep out of trouble, and make sure that my loft doesn't catch on fire or anything, right? Cheers."

  An instant later she was lying on the couch in the converted Redfern warehouse, muscles cramped and head pounding. Across the room, Dread's unmoving form lay like a corpse set out for viewing.

  It was only when she had finished her shower and was sipping her second glass of wine of the afternoon that she realized she had just been taken on what must have been the strangest first date in history.

  "Here, honey," Catur Ramsey told the little girl. "Come here and look at the giraffes."

  She stared at him doubtfully, then at her father, who was standing on the far side of the suite. Sorensen nodded, so she came over and curled up on the couch beside Ramsey. He lifted the hotel guide and touched the picture of the Tanzanian resort; instantly the image sprang to life. Ramsey muted the soundtrack. "See how tall they are?" he asked her. "They eat the leaves on the very tops of the trees."

  Christabel frowned, her big, serious brown eyes curtained by her lashes. He could see she was nervous but doing her best to control it. Catur Ramsey found himself impressed yet again by the composure of such a young child. "Does it hurt their necks to stretch like that?" she asked.

  "Oh, no. Doesn't hurt them any more than it hurts you to reach up and take something off a shelf. That's what they're born to do."

  She bit her lip as the brochure cycled through to a picture of a young, happy, wealthy-looking family dining on the veranda overlooking the waterhole while impala and zebra moved gracefully in and out of the spotlights bathing the veldt.

  Ramsey was not feeling any happier himself. He eyed his pad, wishing he could try to call out again, but the shorter of the two men in black, the one called Pilger—shorter, but still over six feet and muscled like a professional wrestler—was watching him, broad face set in an expression of misleading indifference. Ramsey was furious with himself that he hadn't brought his t-jack.

  Christabel's father, Major Sorensen, had wandered over to the suite's kitchen unit and was fiddling with the touch controls on the range. The big man named Doyle, the general's other bodyguard, or whatever they were, looked over from the European football game he was watching on the wallscreen. "What are you doing?" he asked.

  "I'm just making my daughter a cup of cocoa," Sorensen said scornfully, but Ramsey saw something anomalous in his body language. He had no idea what the major might be doing but he hoped the men in black weren't paying close attention. On the other hand, he hoped that Sorensen wasn't planning anything heroic—Doyle and Pilger were armed to the teeth, and even Sorensen's friend Captain Parkins, sitting stiffly in a chair in his uniform, scowling at the floor, was armed. It was Parkins who had arrested them in the first place, after all, and now they were cooling their heels waiting for General Yacoubian. That made it three large men with guns against himself and Sorensen, both unarmed, and a little girl who probably didn't even have the training wheels off her bike.

  "Daddy," Christabel said suddenly, unable to pretend interest in the lioness that was chasing down a wildebeest for the fifth time through the loop, "when can we go home? I want to see Mommy."

  "Soon, honey."

  Sorensen still had his back to them, waiting for the water to boil, and Ramsey felt a shiver of unease. Doyle and Pilger might look like they were doing anything but performing their professional duty, but Ramsey had met their sort before, both on the military bases of his youth and in the cop bars in which he sometimes found himself in his adult profession. Not to mention that physiques like theirs probably owed something to metabolic enhancement. The one named Doyle certainly had more than a bit of yellow in the whites of his eyes, which could mean any number of unsavory things. If he had gone through one of the military biomod programs, it meant that even if Sorensen threw a pot of boiling water over him, the bodyguard would still be capable of snapping several necks, pain and third-degree burns notwithstanding.

  Oh, man, Ramsey found himself silently begging. Major, please don't do anything stupid.

  He was beginning to wonder just what exactly he had let himself into. Yacoubian clearly knew something that scared Sorensen to death—the man's blood had all but drained into his feet when the general started talking about sunglasses—and they were none of them going anywhere without the general's permission. Ramsey was furious that he had not had more time to talk to Sorensen, and had not even met the strange Sellars before this whole thing had blown up; it was like walking unprepared into a capital murder trial, then finding out that you were the one on trial.

  His nervous thoughts
were interrupted by Christabel scrambling past him toward her father. Sorensen turned and waved her away. "It's hot, Christabel," he said sharply. "I'll bring it to you when it's ready."

  Her face screwed up, and her eyes filled. Ramsey looked helplessly to Captain Parkins, who was still glaring down at the blue carpet as though it had done something to offend him, then went and took her hand and led her back to the couch. "It's okay, honey. Come sit with me. Tell me about your school. Who's your teacher?"

  Something thumped in the far room. For a moment, Ramsey thought he heard the general's voice raised in anger. The two bodyguards flicked each other a look, then turned back to the game. Ramsey wondered who the general's conference was with, and why it was more important than the interrogation of Sorensen. The general had clearly expended a great deal of energy to track the girl's father: it seemed strange he would keep the matter waiting for half an hour or more. Ramsey looked up at the wallscreen. Closer to an hour. What was this all about?

  Something banged the connecting door hard, like someone had taken a sledge to it. Ramsey had only a moment to wonder why such an expensive suite would have doors thin enough to shudder just from someone banging their fist against it in the middle of a phone-conference argument, then Doyle jumped to his feet. He moved across the suite in perhaps two strides, just as frighteningly quick as Ramsey had feared he would be, and stood before the door to the general's room, listening. He knocked twice, loud.

  "General? Are you all right?" He flicked a glance back to Pilger, who had risen now too, then knocked again. "General Yacoubian? Do you need some assistance, sir?" He leaned to the door, straining to hear a reply. After a moment, he pounded again, wide hand flat on the door. "General! Open up, sir!"