by Tad Williams
"Watch," said Sellars.
For a moment the scene on the monitor remained unchanged, the picks rising and falling, the white man with the cigar—Klekker, Sellars had called him; Joseph wanted to remember the Boer pig's name—leaning in to say something. Then Klekker lifted his head like an animal hearing a distant gunshot. A moment later the picture darkened. For an instant, Joseph actually thought the monitor was failing.
It all seemed strange and distant on the tiny screen, without sound. Suddenly, in the new, nightdark dimness of the picture, the men came thrashing up out of the pit. One collapsed to his knees, choking and vomiting, but before Joseph could see what happened to him, the monitor screen went almost completely black.
All the screens of that floor were dimming as the smoke rolled out from the vent near the elevator shaft. Joseph could only catch glimpses of the men, stumbling, falling, crawling toward the exit.
"Die, you bastards!" Joseph shouted. "Burn down my house, do you? Shoot up some fat computer boy you don't even know? Choke and choke and die!"
But they did not all die, at least not as far as he could tell. The monitors recorded their escape to the next level up and their frantic attempts to seal the doorway behind them, but Sellars was apparently forcing the fumes and smoke up to that level as well, so the mercenaries were forced to flee again.
Four of them escaped through the base's massive front door. The camera by the armored gate showed the small, silent shapes as they staggered out into the air and fell to the ground like shipwreck survivors who had reached land against all odds.
"Four," said Del Ray, counting. "So one of them didn't make it out. That's something, anyway."
"The rest of them will not be able to enter the level they were digging in, not for a long time," said Sellars. He did not sound particularly pleased, but there was an undertone of grim satisfaction. "They already had the doors blocked open, probably just to make sure we couldn't trap them anywhere, but I've disabled the vents on that level and it will take them a long time to disperse the fumes."
"I wish it had killed them all," Joseph said.
Jeremiah shook his head and turned away. "A terrible way to die."
"What do you think they are planning for us?" Joseph was irritated. "A braai? Cook up some barbecue, open a few beers?"
"I must leave you for now," Sellers announced. "But I will be in touch again. You should have gained a few days' respite."
When the speaker was silent, Joseph took the damp cloth from his mouth, then had to put it back on.
"He better make sure our air gets better in here," he rasped.
"The vent's still working," said Del Ray. "I think it will get better. But we should put out this fire." He lifted one of the fire extinguishers they had set in readiness.
Joseph hurried to join him. "How are Renie and the little man?" he called back to Jeremiah.
Jeremiah Dako raised his goggles for a moment to squint at the readouts on the console. "Everything steady. They're breathing better air than we are."
"So what do we do now?" Joseph asked, heaving a large fire extinguisher off the floor. Smoke curled around his shoe tops, but the largest part of the cloud was still being sucked into the vents, the grille, and the wall around it stained a shiny, sludgy black.
"What we've been doing," said Jeremiah. "We wait."
"Damn," said Joseph. He fired a gooey plume of foam onto the blaze. "That is the thing I am tired of doing. Why is it that Sellars man can turn this mountain upside down, but he can't send me a damn bottle of wine?"
It was a dream, of course—not the sort that had ravished her life, not the children come back to her after their long silence, but a simple, ordinary dream.
It was nighttime, and Aleksandr was outside the door of her Juniper Bay house. He wanted her to let him in because he had left something behind, but even though she could see his outline in the thin light from the streetlamp—in the dream there was a window beside the door—she felt uncertain. Again and again he called to her, not in pain or anger, but in that sort of explosive preoccupation he had always had, that air of having something important to do that was being prevented by a needlessly obstructive world and its petty details.
He couldn't or wouldn't tell her what it was he had left behind. Driven to a kind of fluttering despair by indecision, she had rummaged through drawers and cabinets, trying to find whatever was so important that he would delay whatever journey he was on, but she could find nothing in any of the places she searched that made any sense at all.
She woke up to the wallscreen yammering and darkness in the spaces between the motel drapes. She had fallen asleep sitting on the bed, in midafternoon, and now only the light from the screen remained. Carelessly, she had nodded off with the drapes not completely closed. Anyone could have stood and watched her through the window.
But did anyone care?
She stood up and pulled the drapes shut, then went back to the warm trough of the bed. As she sat, trying to make peace with being awake, she felt something missing. It took a moment before she realized it was Misha, who at home would have been curled up beside her, or more likely in her lap, his entire little body laid trustingly upon her.
Never again. Tears came to her eyes.
The news was still chattering away in the background. stories of sudden instability in financial markets, of strange rumors, of mysterious silences from key movers and shakers. It was so hard to care. Rather, it was too hard to give it true attention, because the caring was too painful. Once she had sat down every night to watch the news, but each evening's iteration had left her feeling that she and the rest of human civilization were poorly balanced on the crest of some huge wave, that any moment the entire thing would crash down with shattering force.
She turned off the screen. It was time to go. The security officers, corporate police, whatever they were, had given her a bad turn, but clearly they were just investigating all possibilities. People had noticed her asking questions.
After all, for all they knew, I might be a terrorist, she thought. It amused her, then her own amusement struck her as even more ironic. But I am a terrorist.
The urge to laugh, all alone in the now-silent room, seemed unhealthy. She was frightened by the thought of what was to come, that was the truth of it. Olga was not the kind of person who lied much to others, and not at all to herself.
She had lied to the security people, of course, if only by omission. And in a way she had lied to Mr. Ramsey—not by anything she had told him, but by doing it in a written message, knowing he could not respond, that she would not have to defend herself. And just as she had feared, his replies had come hastening back, a chorus of protesting voices that she could not bear to access.
It was time to go. She would sleep in her rental car for a few hours in the out-of-the-way spot she had found deep in the bayou, then when her alarm woke her at midnight, she would make her way in through the swamp in the raft she had bought, try to land somewhere in the park that covered one edge of the artificial island. It seemed unlikely there would be no guards, but there would certainly be fewer of them out on the edges of the impenetrable swamp, wouldn't there?
It wasn't much of a plan, she knew, but it was the best she'd been able to come up with.
The pad would stay hidden in the room, of course; with two weeks' stay already paid for, it would likely go unnoticed longer here than in the car, which might be found in a couple of days. And so she would be able to keep sending entries to it for rerouting until . . . until whatever happened. So at least Mr. Ramsey would know what had happened to her. Perhaps that would be useful to him with the other things he was doing, trying to help those poor children.
She knew she should make a last circuit of the room, but the thought of Catur Ramsey would not leave her so easily. She flipped open the pad and looked at his last three messages, all of them blinking, tagged "urgent," practically screaming for attention. She knew that it would only make her feel worse to access them, that al
l his arguments would make good sense but would change nothing. She was terrible at arguing—Aleksandr had teased her with it, made her agree to ridiculous things, then laughed and refused to take advantage. "You are like water, Olga," he would say. "Always, you give way."
But what if there was something else Ramsey wanted to tell her? What if he needed some other kind of permission from her to sell the house? What if the people who had taken Misha had forgotten the veterinarian's name and couldn't get him his medicine?
She knew she was stalling, fearful of the journey in front of her, but now the worry wouldn't go away. Had that been the meaning of the dream, of dear Aleksandr so fretful outside the door, wanting to leave but unable to go?
She made a last circuit of the room, then picked up the pad. She had decided to leave it in the closet, down at the bottom under the extra blankets. There would be no one in the room, so no reason to put in fresh blankets; the motel's underpaid cleaning crew would be unlikely to go searching for extra work.
Olga slid the pad into the back of the closet, then went to the desk and wrote a note on the quaint, old-fashioned note paper—the one thing about the place that had separated it from the dozen or so others in which she had stayed during this trip. Under the "Bayou Suites" heading, she wrote, "I will be hack for this pad. If it must be taken out of the room, please leave it in the motel office, or contact C. Ramsey, atty.," then added his address and signed her name.
She was all the way back to the closet when the thought of little Misha jumped up at her again. What if something had happened? If he did not get his medicine, he would start having those terrible seizures again. She had told them over and over, his new owners, but who knew how much attention people might be paying?
Poor little thing! I gave him away to strangers. Left him behind.
Her eyes swelling with tears again, Olga swore quietly to herself, then sat down on the bed with the pad across her lap and began opening messages.
CHAPTER 18
Making a Witch
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Mystery Still Surrounds General's Death
(visual: Yacoubian meeting President Anford)
VO: The death of Brigadier General Daniel Yacoubian in a Virginia hotel suite has spawned a surprisingly virulent set of rumors, strangest of which is an assertion by one of the general's bodyguards, Edward Pilger, that he believes Yacoubian was involved in some kind of coup against the American government. Journalist Ekaterina Slocomb, who produced a short documentary on the general for Beltway, an upmarket tabnode, finds that idea hard to swallow.
(visual: Ekaterina Slocomb in studio)
SLOCOMB: "It just doesn't make sense. Yacoubian was friends with a lot of powerful people. Why would he or any of them want to overthrow a government that they already more or less own? Yacoubian was not an ideologue-if anything, he was a kind of ultimate pragmatist. . . ."
* * *
One of these days, Renie thought, something that happens to me in this network is going to make sense. But not yet, obviously. A little creature made of mud who called herself the Stone Girl was stumping along determinedly beside her, on either side of the dark, empty street the giant shoes that housed the local inhabitants were shut up tight against the night and its dangers, and this entire world had grown out of silvery nothing right in front of Renie's eyes.
"I still don't understand why you're coming with me," she told the child. "Aren't you supposed to stay at home? You're already in trouble for my sake."
The Stone Girl's face was as shadowy as the street. "Because . . . because . . . I don't know. Because things are going wrong and no one will listen to me. The stepmother never listens." She wiped defiantly at the dark spots of her eyes, and Renie couldn't help wondering how a child made of earth and rock could cry. "The Ending is getting closer, and the Witching Tree isn't there anymore."
"Hang on. I thought you said that's where we were going—to this Witching Tree."
"We are. We just have to find out where it is now."
Renie chewed this over as they made their way out through the outskirts of the shoe-village. It was touching and disconcerting, both. The girl's willingness to push against the normal order of her life made Renie think of Brother Factum Quintus back in the House world—it was hard to imagine someone programming such flexible individuality into any mere simulacrum, but over and over she had seen the evidence. There was something different about this newest simulation, though—something more than the fact it seemed to have been created by the Other itself. A ragged bit of memory was still tickling her, and had been ever since she had first seen the shoe where the Stone Girl and her motley assortment of siblings lived, but it remained out of reach.
So what do I know? That this place is made up from some kind of nursery rhyme—or from lots of them, more likely. I never heard of any Stone Girl in the "Old Lady and the Shoe" rhyme. Martine said she taught the Other a song—that "angel" thing it was singing when we first saw it on the mountaintop. Maybe she taught it some stories, too.
But that still did not scratch the itch at the back of her memory.
They had reached the edge of the dark settlement. There was no moon, only a sort of dully glowing latency to the sky that left it just a shade more purple than black and gave faint shape to the shadowy world. Renie could barely make out the small person walking right next to her. She had just begun to wander what would happen if she lost her little guide when a glowing apparition stepped out in front of them, billowing and moaning.
Frightened, Renie grabbed for the Stone Girl, but her companion shook off her hand. "It's just Weeweekee," she said.
"Stop!" The thing lifted its hand. A glowing ball hung just above it, a flame with no source. "Who goes there?"
"It's me, the Stone Girl."
As they drew closer, the weird apparition blocking their path became only slightly less so—a kind of human-sized rodent in a pale, flowing outfit like a hooded wedding dress. It waved its paw and the hovering ball of fire followed its hand—an impressive display, somewhat undercut by the creature's chubby cheeks and goggling black-bead eyes.
"You should be in bed," the giant marmot, or whatever it was, declared in the voice of a tattletale child. "For it's eight o'clock."
"How can it tell?" This was the first Renie had heard any mention of exact time for longer than she could remember. "How does it know it's eight o'clock?"
"That's just his word for 'dark,'" the Stone Girl explained.
"All children should be in their beds," Weeweekee told her.
"I'm not going to bed. I'm going out to search for the Witching Tree, and she's going with me. So there."
"But . . . but . . . you can't." His voice was swiftly losing any semblance of authority—in fact, getting dangerously near a squeak. "Everyone is to be in bed. I have to rap at all the windows."
"The stepmother threw us both out," asserted the Stone Girl, which was not true, but close enough. "We can't go back."
Weeweekee was getting close to panic now. "Then you can go in somewhere else, can't you? Just . . . go to bed. There must be some other beds, even with all the people sleeping in the street."
"Not for us," the little girl said firmly. "We are going out into the Wood."
Now the dark eyes widened with horror. "But you can't! It's eight o'clock!"
"Good night, Weeweekee." The Stone Girl took Renie's arm and led her past the creature, whose whiskers and hovering flame were both drooping.
Renie turned to look back at him. The rodent was still standing as if frozen, staring after them with misery clear in every line of his being. Even his filmy robes had lost their animation.
"Oh," said Renie, and suddenly found herself struggling not to laugh. "Oh. He's Wee Willie Winkie. In his nightgown." It came back to her in one piece, like an evocative scent—the paper Mother Goose book her grandmother had given her for her fifth birthday, the pictures bright as candy wrappers. She had been a little disappointed, wishing it were something that moved
by itself like the children's stories she saw on their small netscreen, which all featured exciting toys (even though her family couldn't afford most of them) but her mother had given her a discreet push in the back and she had carefully thanked Uma' Bongela and put the book beside her bed.
Only months later, on a day when she had been home from school sick while her mother was out and her father was working, had she finally opened it. The strangeness of some of the words had confused her, but it had caught at her, too, like a window suddenly open into places she could barely imagine. . . .
"Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town
Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown
Rapping at the window, crying at the lock,
'Are the children all in bed? For now it's eight o'clock.' "
This recital gained her an irritated look from the Stone Girl. "His name is Weeweekee," she corrected Renie, with the air of someone dealing with the borderline competent.
It took a moment for Renie to realize that even without Weeweekee and his magical candle, she could actually see that expression on her companion's face. "It's getting lighter!"
The Stone Girl pointed to the surrounding hills. A radiant sliver had appeared along the crest—a frighteningly wide sliver. As Renie watched in mingled fascination and unease, the full moon slid up into the sky. It seemed to cover a huge portion of the heavenly firmament, a vast blue-white disk that nevertheless gave scarcely more light than the ordinary variety.
"That's . . . that's the biggest moon I've ever seen."
"You've seen more than one?"
Renie shook her head. Easier just not to talk. This was a dreamworld—probably the dream of something not even human—and wrestling too strenuously with the particulars was useless.
