by Tad Williams
"Martine, can you tell if that's really a town-Dodge City, or whatever this is? I can't see it very well."
"We will reach it soon enough." She reached up and rubbed listlessly at her temples. "Forgive me."
"What in hell is going on?" Florimel said.
For a moment Paul thought she was talking about Martine's unwillingness to come look; then he saw that just ahead another half-dozen cables ran in from the hillside and then bent off a leaning pole and stretched over the top of the roadway like a musical staff with no notes. An instant later they were bouncing along beneath the awning of black lines, and Paul could not help seeing that the cables now surrounded them on all sides. They hung loosely, a meter or two of empty space between each pair, so they were not in any way trapped, but it was still an unsettling sight.
"I don't know," Paul belatedly answered Florimel. "But I don't like it very much. . . ." He looked up past T4b just as the wagon rounded a bend, still traveling in a tube of telegraph cables. The young man swore and jerked back hard on the reins. Their horse was already trying to slow up, but the weight of the wagon behind it was too much and the creature's knob-knuckled feet were furrowing the roadway.
Just a few dozen meters ahead the cables all ran together, knotted in a crooked black mandala across the middle of the wide road. It looked like. . . .
"Christ!" shouted Florimel, tumbling as the horse tangled in the traces and the wagon began to sway alarmingly. "What. . . ?"
It looked like a huge spiderweb.
"Get out!" Paul shouted. The horse had bolted to the inner side of the roadway and the wagon could not make a sharp enough turn to follow. The wheels dug and skidded. The whole wagon began to tip even as it plunged swiftly forward into the swaying net of cables, now only a stone's throw away. "Jump-now!"
Martine was wrapped around his legs. The wagon bed was tilting up sideways, lifting them inexorably toward the canyon side of the road. Paul bent down and grabbed the blind woman, then did his best to climb to the rising side of the wagon, hoping to leap out toward the hillside, but Martine's weight was too much for him.
One of the wagon wheels snapped with a noise like a gunshot. A splintered piece of spoke arrowed past his face and the whole wagon groaned like a wounded animal as it tumbled onto its side.
Paul had no chance to pick spots. He grabbed Martine and flung himself off the wagon bed. Something sticky caught at him, sagging beneath his weight, and for a moment he had the alarming sight of nothing but empty air beneath him, of the full vertiginous drop down the crazy-banded side of the canyon. He half-slid, half-fell down the row of cables until he was sitting in a painful, twisted position in the roadway, stuck at the nexus point of two of the black bands, with Martine lying motionless across his lap.
Before he could even look for the others, the wagon and the trapped, tethered horse rolled into the web of cable blocking the roadway, flinging up a dense cloud of dust. One of the horse's legs was obviously broken; it writhed helplessly in the wreckage of the wagon, a mess of kicking black fur and splintered wood dangling from the sticky web.
Then the web's builders appeared-hairy gray-and-brown shapes climbing up from the canyon or down the hillside, scuttling along the strands like spiders.
Spiders would have been bad enough. These things had the faces of dead buffalo, with hanging tongues and rolling eyes, atop their malformed, many-limbed bodies. Worst of all, they were even more clearly part-human than the insect-monsters of Kunohara's world. They hissed with hungry pleasure as they advanced down the swaying cables. The first of them to reach the middle of the web began to pull the living horse apart, bickering in wet, piping voices over the best bits, ignoring the creature's agonized squeals as they began to feed.
Paul tried to drag himself upright, but the sticky cables held him like a strong hand.
"CODE Delphi. Start here.
"It seems pointless to me even to record these thoughts, since I cannot believe we will ever leave this place, but the habit dies hard.
"It is dark here, the others tell me-some kind of underground nest, filthy to smell and unpleasant to hear. I wish I could limit myself to those two senses, but in my own way I can even see the things moving, eating, coupling. They are horrible. I am running out of hope. My strength is all but gone.
"I suppose we are alive only because they feasted on the horse first. The sounds it made dying were. . . . No. What is the point? Is there something we can do? I can think of nothing. There are dozens of the monsters. We should have tried to escape when we were first seized. Now we are in their nest. Any hope that they eat only animals has been destroyed by the human bones that lie everywhere, in careless piles. Those I touched have been picked clean of flesh and broken for marrow.
"Horrible things. T4b, who has spent most of the time praying, called them 'rotten-cow spiders.' I have not had a clear impression of them. What I perceive is the mass of them, the limbs, the voices-almost human, but my God, that word 'almost'. . . !
"Stop, Martine. We have faced situations as bad as this and survived. Why is it that I am so weak, so weary, so miserable? Why have the past days felt like work too hard for me to do?
"It is. . . .
"Good God. One of the things came to sniff at us. Florimel drove it away by kicking at it, but it did not seem frightened. They do smell of rotted meat, but they also have another scent, something strange I cannot define, something nonliving. This whole place, this simworld, seems to be in a paroxysm of change. The others can see only what is at this moment, but I can perceive the changes that have happened and those that are about to happen. Dread has grabbed the place and squeezed hard. This world has not resisted him any better than would a fistful of butter. Heaven only knows what these poor creatures were. People, perhaps. Ordinary people with ordinary lives. Now they live in holes in the ground and squeak like rats and eat things that are still screaming.
"Where is Paul? I cannot sense him near me anymore. But the noise and heat and confusion make it difficult. . . .
"Florimel says he is just a few meters away, on his hands and knees. Poor man. To have gone through so much, only to end here.
"I cannot stand this anymore-any of it. Ever since the Trojan simulation I have been dazed as an electroshock victim. In between the terrors and lesser distractions I have tried to find myself, the Martine I know, but it is as if I have been hollowed. The memory of the last hours of Troy haunts me. How could I do such a thing? Even to save these friends, how could I bring death to so many? Rape and torture and destruction? And after watching the pitiable humanity of Hector and his family, too.
"I tell myself over and over that they were only Simulaera, not real, only bits of gear. Sometimes I believe it, for hours at a stretch. Maybe it truly is so, but I know that I cannot stop seeing the spear plunging into that Trojan soldier's stomach, the horror on his face. How can I know that was not someone like us, still trapped in the system, forced to play out his part in a famous war? Not likely, perhaps, but still . . . still.
"I dreamed last night that the great burning light of my own blinding came streaming out of his wound. I dreamed that I fell into a darkness even greater than the one I have known.
"I cannot stand this place. I cannot live with this madness. I ran away from all of this years ago. I am not meant to care this much. I do not want to be terrified anymore, to see my friends threatened and hounded and killed.
"I do not want to meet Dread again.
"There. That is perhaps the greatest fear. I admit it! Even should some improbable thing happen, should we drag ourselves out of this stinking pit, away from these cannibal monstrosities, it does not take magic to know that any road back to the real world must run through him. He handled me as though I were a child-made me whimper. Made me beg him to stop, and all without needing to cause any physical pain. Now he has the power of a god, and he is furious.
"Oh, merciful Heaven, I don't want this.
"It's all too much. I wish could turn off these senses. I
want to cover it all over, bury myself in the dark-but not this dark! Escape . . . I don't want this!
"They're coming toward us, a great group of them. Are they . . . singing?
"Paul is gone-Florimel says so. Have they already taken him?
"T4b! They're coming! Get over here with Florimel and me!
"I wish he had his armor. I should . . . if this is the last . . . I should . . . but. . . .
"Oh, God, not this. . . !"
CHAPTER 17
Breathing Problems
* * *
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)-"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"
(visual: Looshus and Kantee reading the Reality Scroll)
VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) have discovered that Superintendent Skullflesh (Richard Raymond Balthazar) is the reborn prophet of the Stellar Knowledge cult, and is preparing a blood sacrifice of the entire school population to bring on the end of the world. Casting 4 hall monitors, 7 cult members. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST
* * *
It made a very small pile when she looked at it, all the things she had bought, all the things that she would carry with her into this last and strangest country of a life that had seen many countries and many strange things.
The new telematic jack was small, of course, no larger than the standard variety despite its additional range. It had cost a decent fraction of her bank account, but the salesman had sworn that it would keep her in touch with her fancy Dao-Ming pad at a distance of several miles—"even in the middle of a high-usage telecom area during an electrical storm," he had cheerfully promised. Olga didn't know about storms, although she had spent enough days now near the Gulf of Mexico to know that even on a clear day lightning never seemed more than a breath away, but she guessed that an island with its own army and air force would probably qualify as a "high-usage telecom area."
Beside the jack sat a small but extremely powerful LED flashlight, a piece of high-tech paraphernalia usually sold to businessmen with too much money, and despite its dramatic name—something like "SpyLite" or "SpaceLight," she couldn't remember which—seldom used for anything much more dramatic than finding dropped keys in a parking lot, she guessed. She had also bought something called an Omni-Tool from the same store, then changed her mind and exchanged it for a more familiar Swiss Army knife. She had always meant to buy one, had thought dozens of times what a handy object it would be for a woman living on her own, but for some reason had never done it. The fact that she had finally bought one, a top-of-the-line model with all kinds of clever hidden devices and built-in microcircuitry, helped mark the occasion. Things had changed. She was not the same Olga Pirofsky.
What did one bring on an infiltration of one of the world's largest and best-guarded corporations? She supposed there were many more things she could have bought, guns and cutting torches and surveillance devices, but it all smacked too much of boys playing war games. Besides, she was fairly certain she would be arrested at some point, and a pocketful of plastic explosives or wall-climbing pitons would make it hard to pretend she had wandered away from a tour group.
So her pile of tools to take behind enemy lines was a small one: the new jack, the knife, the flashlight, and the one object of sentiment she had not been able to leave behind in Juniper Bay with the rest of her old life. Thee curl of white plastic was certainly not going to arouse anyone's suspicions. Olga's last name and first initial, as written decades ago by some nurse who might very well be dead, had almost faded away. Olga herself had cut the bracelet to remove it, but had never thrown it away, and through all the years in her top drawer it had retained the curve of her wrist. Many times she had come within inches of tossing it in the trash, but the O. Pirofsky who had worn that hospital bracelet was a different person, and the tiny snake of pale plastic was her only tangible connection to that Olga, a girl with her life ahead of her, a young woman with a husband named Aleksandr still alive, so very much alive, a young woman about to give birth. . . .
Something rapped quickly and authoritatively on the motel room door. Startled, Olga dropped the bracelet back onto the small pile of objects in the middle of the bed. After a moment's hesitation, she stepped to the door and looked out through the fish-eye peephole. A black woman and white man stood there, both in dark suits.
For a moment she leaned breathlessly against the door, heart racing for no reason she could say. Missionaries, they must be—this whole region was acrawl with them, people with nothing better to do than walk around in heavy clothing on the hottest day, trying to convince others that there was somewhere hotter yet they might be going if they didn't embrace the doorstepper's faith.
The knock came again; something in its weight drove all thought of ignoring it out of her mind. She tossed her motel bathrobe over the things lying on the bed—irritated, despite her fright, that these people would now think she was the kind of person who normally left things strewn around the room.
It was the black woman who took the lead when the door opened. She smiled at Olga, although it seemed a little perfunctory, and drew a long flat wallet out of her coat pocket. "You're Ms. Pirofsky, is that right, ma'am?"
"How do you know me?"
"Manager gave us your name. Nothing to worry about, ma'am, we just wanted a few words with you." The woman flipped open the wallet, a brief glimpse of something that looked like a hologram of a police badge. "I'm Officer Upshaw and this is my partner, Officer Casaro. We'd like to ask you a couple of questions."
"Are you . . . police?"
"No, ma'am, we're security officers for J Corporation."
"But I. . . ." In her fear and surprise, she had been about to say that she didn't work for J Corporation anymore. She managed to keep her mouth shut, but only at the expense of looking like a slow and stupid old woman. But, she thought, perhaps there could be worse ways to look.
The man Casaro had only briefly made eye contact with her, and unlike his partner, he made no effort to smile. The black pinholes in the center of his pale eyes looked past her into the room itself, as if he were some kind of machine recording everything he saw for future study. Olga suddenly remembered her grandmother describing the old Polish secret police. "They didn't look at you, they looked through you, even when they were talking to you. Like x-rays."
"What . . . what could you possibly want to ask someone like me?"
Officer Upshaw grudgingly used the smile again. "We're just doing our job, ma'am. We heard you were asking some questions in various places about the J Corporation campus."
"The campus?" She could not shake the feeling that they had been following her ever since she had walked out the doors of Obolos Entertainment—that this was only a bit of cruel pretense, and at any moment they would throw her to the floor and handcuff her.
"The buildings, the facilities—that's what we call it, ma'am. Some of the local merchants, well, they let us know when people are asking questions." She shrugged, and for the first time Olga saw how young this woman really was—perhaps just past college age, and with a bit of insecurity in the measured way she spoke. "Now could you please tell us what brings you to the area and what your interest in J Corporation might be?"
Officer Casaro's long inspection of everything behind Olga finally ended. His eyes found hers and locked. She felt her knees go a little weak. "Certainly," she managed to say after a moment. "Why don't you come in—all of the air-conditioning will get out, otherwise."
An almost imperceptible look flicked between the two. "That's fine, ma'am. Thank you."
After Olga gathered up the things on the bed, under the guise of tidying away the bathrobe, and deposited the bundle on the counter in the tiny bathroom, she was able to relax a little. None of the objects that had been lying there were illegal or even particularly suspicious for someone who had made her living in net entertainment, but she didn't really want her possession of a telematic jack that cost as much as a small car to become a topic of conversation.
As her initial
terror ebbed a little, she began to believe that things might be no worse than they appeared. She had been asking questions in what was, after all, a company town, and the company itself was famously secretive. Similarly, if they had her name from the credit information at the motel, she couldn't very well pretend to be someone different, could she? Somewhere on that island—perhaps in the black tower itself—were the records of Pirofsky, O., employee.
"You see," she told them, "I worked for a J Corporation subsidiary for years—you've seen Uncle Jingle, haven't you? I worked on that show." Upshaw nodded and smiled politely. Casaro didn't bother. "And since I was in the area—I'm taking a car trip across America now that I'm retired—I just thought I'd come see it. After all, they've been paying my salary for years!"
She answered a few more questions, all from Officer Upshaw, and did her best to pretend she was enjoying the break in routine, the importance of a visit from security officers. She struggled to remember the innocent taxpayer's serenity she had always been able to bring to her encounters with police in Juniper Bay.
You're an actress, aren't you? So act!
It seemed to work. The questions got more perfunctory, and even Casaro's surgical examination of Olga and her room gradually dulled to something like bored routine. She had no urge to rekindle his interest. She started telling a true but circumstantially pointless story about her dog Misha, which finally did the trick.
"We're sorry, but we'll have to get going, Mr. Pirofsky," said Upshaw, rising. "We're sorry to have bothered you." Feeling almost pleased with herself now, she hazarded the tiniest return of serve. "Maybe you can tell me, since I haven't been able to find out for certain. Is there any kind of tour of the . . . the campus, as you called it? I'd hate to come all this way and not get to see it except from a distance."
