by Tad Williams
As carefully as a specialist handling an unexploded bomb, Dulcie picked the Ushabti file out from the midst of the estate information and moved it onto her private system, then went back to work sorting files.
Dread could hide things? Dread wanted to keep secrets from her? Well, Dulcie could keep secrets of her own.
"Lets have another one," Dread decided. "This is interesting."
He waved his hand and a dark-haired, muscular man shuffled forward into the glare of torches and fell to his knees. His linen robes showed signs of having been costly once, but they were singed and torn, and his black wig sat askew.
"What's your name?" Dread asked him.
"Seneb, O Lord."
"And what do you do?" Dread turned to the woman beside him. "Kind of funny, isn't it? Like a game show."
"I . . . I am a m–m–merchant, O Great House." He was so terrified he could hardly speak.
"Tell me . . . hmmm. What did you have for breakfast this morning?"
Seneb paused, fearful of a wrong answer. "I . . . I had nothing, Lord. I have not eaten in two days."
Dread waved a huge, pitch-black hand. "The last time you had brekkie, then, mate. What did you have?"
"Bread, Lord. And a little beer." The man wrinkled his forehead, thinking desperately. "And a duck egg! Yes, a duck egg."
"See?" Dread grinned at his female guest, his red jackal tongue lolling. It was much more entertaining to do these kinds of things with a real human audience. "Every one different." He pointed to the priest he had been interrogating only moments before beginning on the merchant. "And what do you think of this bloke, eh? Is he a good man?"
Seneb looked at the cowering priest, again unsure of the answer that was wanted. "He is a priest of Osiris, Lord. All the priests of Osiris are good men . . . are they not?"
"Well, since Osiris has stepped out for a while. . . ." Dread smirked. "I suppose we'll have to leave that question unanswered. But how about if I asked you to fight with him? To kill him if you can?"
Seneb, for all his beefy size, was trembling. That might have been in part because the jackal-headed god on the throne before him was twice human height. "If the great Lord wishes it," he said at last, "then I must do it."
Dread laughed. "See? Some of them can't wait to pitch into one of the priests. Some of the others think it's sacrilege and won't do it to save their own lives. It's bloody marvelous."
His guest looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"Don't you see?" Dread asked. "You can't predict anything here! God—no pun intended—but this is an impressive situation. They all are." He turned to Seneb. "If you kill him, I'll let you live."
Seneb stared shamefacedly at the priest, hesitating.
"What are you waiting for?"
"And . . . and my family?"
"You want to kill your family, too?" Dread barked a laugh. "Ah, I see, you want to know if I'll spare your family. Cheers. Why not?"
As the merchant Seneb raised his hands and lurched toward the priest, an older, frailer man who now moaned in fear. Dread shook his head in continued wonderment. It really was quite stunning. He remembered the Renie woman and others commenting on it, but with the total access he now enjoyed, the unshackled freedom to bend the network's simulated humans into any shape pain and power could contrive, it was even more clear: the individuality of these constructs was something unprecedented, each with its own little internal universe of hopes and prejudices and memories.
He could almost see why someone like Jongleur thought he could spend an eternity in this place. Not that he could imagine such a thing himself, at least not in the immediate future. Dread had nearly exhausted most of the obvious ways of enjoying himself, and although he definitely planned to take advantage of the Grail network's immortality options, he was not ready to give up the pleasures of real as opposed to virtual flesh. Not yet.
Still, there was fun to be had.
"Come on, admit it—you're rooting for one of them."
The woman beside him shut her mouth in a firm line. Dread smiled. This was much more fun than anything he could do with Dulcie, to whom he was still forced to show a friendly face. After all, there was still so much more he needed her for. He had a lot to learn about the Grail network, but now that he had confirmed the Old Man's continuing absence—Jongleur's private line had gone dead, and if he still was somewhere in the Grail system, he was as marooned as any of Dread's former companions had been—he needed her to find a way into Jongleur's personal files. He badly wanted information about the operating system, and also about things that mattered outside the small, hermetic world of the Otherland system.
With the Old Man's money and power, Dread thought happily, I can be a god in the real world, too. I can play these kind of tricks with real people. Industrial accidents. Biochemical releases, A few small wars when the mood strikes me. And then I'll have the Grail network to keep me alive.
Astonishing vistas had opened up. Control of the Otherland system, which had seemed like the be-all and end-all, might only be the beginning.
John Wulgaru, he thought to himself. Little Johnny Dread. King of the world.
The merchant Seneb fought clumsily, but the aged priest was no match. His mostly toothless mouth sagged open as the younger man seized him and cracked his head against the polished stone of the temple floor, over and over.
Dread's female guest had closed her eyes. He smiled. If she thought that would solve the problem, she might be interested to find out how easily her eyelids could be removed. He turned to his other guest, who was just beginning to groan his way back to consciousness.
"A little bored?" Dread waved his silver staff and the merchant and priest melted screaming into puddles on the marble. The crowd of watchers shrieked too. Dread was intrigued; he had expected them all to be numbed to pain and death by now. "Well, then perhaps it's time to get on with our own business."
"You can torture me as much as you want," the woman said. "Even if you really were the Devil, I'd have nothing for you but the back of my hand."
"Oh, come now." Dread leaned over until his great muzzle touched her cheek and his nose pressed wetly on her ear. He licked the side of her face and wondered idly what it would feel like to take her head off in one bite. Would knowing it was a real person make it different? He had tried it enough times with this simworld's virtual inhabitants. "Let's play a game . . . what was your name? Ah, right, Bonnie Mae. Let's play a game, Bonnie Mae. Every time you tell me something useful about the Circle, or about some friends of mine I know you met, that's worth an hour without pain. Play your cards right, you could have a couple of nice days' vacation here in sunny Egypt."
"I'll tell you nothing. Get thee behind me, Satan."
"Yes, well, I'm sure you'd keep your mouth shut like a good little martyr, no matter what I did to you, Little Red Riding Hood. At least at first. But let's not waste time." He turned and reached a massive hand toward the other prisoner. The ends of Dread's stark black fingers began to glow an incandescent red. "But how long can you stay quiet if it's your little Indian friend here that's taking the punishment?" He leered at his male captive. "Wishing you had made it out of this simulation before I took over, aren't you?" He closed his long fingers on the man's leg. Flesh sizzled and steamed. The prisoner's shrieks made even the numbed crowd moan and fall to the floor.
"No!" the woman screamed. "Stop it, you devil! Stop it!"
"But that's just the point, sweetness." Dread lifted his smoking fingers in a gesture of mock helplessness. "It's not up to me to stop it—it's up to you."
"Don't . . . don't tell him anything, Mrs. Simpkins!" Nandi Paradivash was shivering with agony, but struggling to remain upright. "I am no less bound than you. My life is nothing. My pain is nothing."
"Oh, on the contrary," said Dread. "It's quite a bit. And if she won't talk to save you, I think you will when I start on her." He grinned, displaying a line of teeth like an ivory chess set. "Because I do even better work on women."
CHAPTER 14
The Stone Girl
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Net Has Its Own Folklore
(visual: artist's rendering of TreeHouse node)
VO: Net historian Gwenafra Glass says that, like all new countries, the net has its own folktales, mythical beasts, and ghosts.
GLASS: "You go back to the earliest days and you hear about things like cable lice. TreeHouse is another sort of example. It's a real node, but it's been embroidered over the years into something that's mostly fantasy. And more recently we have things like the Weeper, which is a strange sobbing voice people hear sometimes in unoccupied chat nodes and unfinished VR nodes. And of course an old folktale from the twentieth century, the gremlins that used to lock up fighter airplanes, has carried over into the Glowbugs and Lightsnakes that people these days claim to have seen in VR environments, but no one ever finds in the code. . . ."
* * *
Renie looked wildly from side to side, but could see no sign of whatever had made the sound. The nearest of the ghostly shapes pursuing her was a pale smear in the twilight murk, frighteningly close, but still several dozen meters away. She took a step to steady herself and to her horror felt something clutch at her ankle. She leaped away with a muffled shriek.
"Down here," a small voice said. "You can hide!"
Something rustled near Renie's feet. "I . . . I can't see you." Wind carried the pursuing creature's liquid groan down the slope. "Where are you?"
"Down. Get down!"
Renie dropped to her hands and knees amid the undergrowth, baffled by the shadows. One of the patches of darkness widened a little and a small hand reached out, closed on her wrist, and tugged. Renie crawled forward and found herself in a recess scarcely larger than her own huddled form, a space where a tangle of fallen branches had been silted over with crushed leaves and dirt. Pushing in headfirst, she could see nothing of the pocket's other inhabitant, and could feel only a childlike form pressed the length of her side. "Who are you?" she asked quietly.
"Sssshhh." The shape next to her stiffened. "It's close."
Renie's heart was still beating uncomfortably fast. "But won't it smell us?" she whispered.
"It doesn't smell things—it hears them."
Renie shut her mouth. She huddled, the smell of damp earth in her nostrils, and tried not to think about being buried alive.
She felt the hunter's approach before she heard it, a gradually growing sense of panic that made her skin tighten and her already speeding heart threaten to rattle right out of her chest. Was this the helpless, paralyzing horror that Paul Jonas felt each time the Twins came near him? Her respect for the man went up another notch, even as she fought down shrieking panic.
The terrifying thing had moved above them now; she could sense it as clearly as if a cloud had swung in front of the sun. Her throat tightened until the urge to scream was gone. She could not have made a noise if she wanted.
But the thing itself was not silent. It moaned again, the sound so pulsingly near that it seemed to turn Renie's bones to sand in their sockets, in the wake of that awful noise she could hear other sounds, a sighing murmur, as though the phantom whispered to itself in a voice of wind, meaningless sounds just on the edge of speech. The breathy gibberish was as unbearable as the scream. It was the sound of a dying or even dead intelligence, an empty madness. Renie, already in darkness, squeezed her eyes shut until her face ached, clenched her teeth together, and prayed directionlessly for strength.
The sounds gradually grew more faint. The sensation of hungry, brainless malevolence also lessened. Renie cautiously let out her breath. The shape beside her touched her arm with cool fingers, as though to warn her against premature celebration, but Renie had no urge at all to move or make a sound.
Several minutes passed before the small voice said, "I think they're all gone now."
Renie wasted no time backing out of the tiny cavern of twigs and leaf-scatter. Afternoon, or what passed for it in this sunless place, was almost entirely gone. The world was gray, but seemed still a bit too bright for this shank of twilight, as though the stones and even the trees gave off a faint light of their own.
The foliage rustled at her feet. The little figure that crawled out was mottled gray and brown, human-shaped but not very exactly so, as though it had been cut out of raw soil with a cookie cutter.
Renie took a step backward, "Who are you?"
The newcomer looked at her, surprise evident on its face—a face mostly suggested by the arrangement of dark and light spots and bumps and holes in the dun-colored surface. "You don't know me?" The voice was soft but surprisingly clear. "I'm the Stone Girl. I thought everyone knew me. But you didn't know enough to hide, so I guess that makes sense."
"I'm sorry. Thank you for helping me." She stared out along the empty hillside. "What . . . what were those things?"
"Those?" The Stone Girl gave her a look of mild surprise. "Just some Jinnears. They come out at night. I shouldn't have stayed out so late, but. . . ." The Stone Girl's expression suddenly became morose, in its simple way. She bent and brushed herself free of clinging leaves, quite deftly considering the thickness of her limbs and the clumsy shape of her blunt fingers and toes.
"So who are you?" the little girl asked when she had straightened up. "Why don't you know about Jinnears?"
"Just a stranger," Renie said. "A traveler, I guess." The Stone Girl might look as though she had been quickly molded from raw soil, but there was an odd suppleness to her movements, as though she could bend in places other than just the normal joints. "Do you live here?" Renie asked her. "Can you tell me anything about it?" A sudden thought struck her. "I'm looking for some friends—one is a small man, almost as dark as me, the other is a girl with curly hair and paler skin. Have you seen them?"
The indentations that were the Stone Girl's eyes widened, "You sure ask a lot of questions."
"I'm sorry. I'm . . . I'm lost. Have you seen them?"
The little head tilted slowly from side to side. "No. Were you out in the Ending?"
"If you mean that place over there where things get . . . kind of strange, hard to see. . . . Yes, I guess so." Renie suddenly realized how tired she was. "I really need to find my friends."
"You need to get out of here, that's for sure. I do, too—I should never have been out so late, but I was trying to get to the Witching Tree to ask about the Ending." The Stone Girl followed this unedifying explanation with a moment of silent thought. "You'd better come with me to see the stepmother," she said at last.
"The stepmother? Who's that?"
"Don't you have one? Don't you have a family at all?"
Renie sighed. This had become another one of those incomprehensible Otherland conversations. "Never mind. Sure, take me to this stepmother. Is it far?"
"Shoes. Down by the bottom of the Pants," the Stone Girl added, equally cryptically, and waddled past Renie to begin clambering down the hillside.
It didn't take long for Renie to understand the geographical reference, although it was not the kind of understanding that really explained anything.
As they made their way down the hillside in the dying light, following the course of the river, which emerged through a gash in the hillside and splashed energetically down toward the misty valley below, Renie began to see that her earlier observations had been disturbingly true. The shapes of the distant hills mimicked that of human forms, although they were still true hills, made at least on the surface from soil and covered in vegetation, as though earth had covered over the carcasses of titan forms. But where the giant on the black mountaintop had been singular and unquestionably alive, these smaller and more numerous forms buried in the earth seemed the remnants of some impossibly earlier time.
"What is this place?" she asked her guide when she caught up with her again.
The Stone Girl tried to look back over her shoulder, but it was hard without a neck. "Haven't you been here? It's Where The Beans Talk. You can see all the giants that fell. T
hey're big," she added somewhat unnecessarily.
"Real giants?" Renie asked, then immediately felt stupid. As if such a question could mean anything in a world like this.
The Stone Girl seemed to take it at face value, however. "They were. They fell. I don't remember why. Maybe you could ask the stepmother."
As they followed the line of the cataracts down, Renie began to understand the rest of the girl's strange description. When she had seen them through the mist, the land's unusual features had seemed only the effect of odd hills and shadowy copses of trees, but now that she could see better she began to make out a strange order. One great fold of hillside, a ridge with a line of trees stark along its spine, was now revealed to be a single huge. . . .
". . . Sleeve?" Renie said. "It's a sleeve? Do you mean we're walking down a . . . a shirt?"
The Stone Girl again twitched her head in the negative. "Jacket. We're in the Jackets now. The Shirts are over there." She pointed a stubby finger. "Do you want to go to the Shirts?"
Renie shook her head violently. "No. No, I was just . . . surprised. Why is this country . . . why is it all made of clothes?"
The Stone Girl stopped and turned, apparently tired of trying to talk over her shoulder without the proper anatomical equipment. She looked as though she suspected Renie of making sport of her. "Why, they came off the giants, didn't they? When they fell."
"Ah," said Renie, who could think of nothing else to say. "Of course."
As they descended through river mist down a long fold of one of the Jackets, picking their way between the small but stubborn pines that seemed to cluster on all the most narrow and difficult bits of the path, Renie asked her small guide, "Do you know anything about birds that talk?"
The Stone Girl shrugged. "Sure. Lots of birds talk."
"This one kept repeating the same thing again and again, no matter what I asked it."
