by Tad Williams
CHAPTER 30
Climbing the Mountain
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Doctor Sued for Keeping Patient Alive
(visual: Dr. Sheila Loughtin and Beltings' parents at news conference)
VO: In what the International Medical Association is calling "a frightening low point in corporate compassion," a doctor is being sued by an insurance provider for keeping a patient alive past the point which Trans-European Health Insurance claims is "either ethically or financially supportable." The patient, ten-year-old Eamon Sellings of Killarney, Ireland, has been in a Tandagore coma for almost a year, but his parents and doctor refuse to remove his life support despite the demands of the insurance company. . . .
* * *
"I'm sorry," Sellars told her, but it has to go all the way to the back. That way it will be hard for anyone to find the source—that might buy you an additional half an hour to get out."
Olga wiped the sweat out of her eyes and leaned back into the duct, wedging her shoulders so she could keep her hands free. The basement hadn't seemed that hot when she started half an hour earlier, but it was beginning to feel like she was working in a sauna. She angled the camera ring to pick up the corner where the flashlight had splashed white, trying to make sure Sellars could see. "Back there?"
"Yes, that should do it. But see if you can get it behind that bundle of cables so it's a little less visible."
Olga took a moment to wipe her wet, slippery hands clean on her coveralls before lifting the bottle out of her backpack.
"You have to prime it first," Sellars said, almost apologetically. "Twist the nozzle until it clicks."
She did, briefly fearful that despite the assurances of Sellars and Major Sorensen the thing might explode in her hands, but it made only the expected noise; a moment later she was pushing it into the space she had opened by yanking a twined cable of polymer-covered cables to one side. She sat up, rubbing her hands again, and said, "It's in. Do you want to see it?"
"That's all right. . . ." Sellars had begun when someone grabbed her waist from behind.
"Caught you!"
Olga shrieked and fell off the edge of the duct backward and landed on the concrete floor, banging her elbow painfully. Panicked, she scrambled into a crouch, conscious that she had no weapon except her flashlight, and that if Sellars triggered the smoke bomb now it would be more likely to asphyxiate her than to help her escape. She could hear his startled voice talking inside her head.
"Olga? What happened?"
She reached up and pressed the t-jack, damping the sound input. The man standing over her looked just as shocked as she did. He wore a J Corporation uniform like hers, and had a lot of gray in his hair, but his posture was that of a scolded child, arms held up, hands dangling.
"You're not Lena!" He backed up a step. "Who are you?"
Olga's heart was beating like a drumroll, as though she stood at the top of a platform about to leap out to a distant trapeze. "No," she said, trying to decide if she should take advantage of his obvious surprise and shove her way past him to the door. "No, I'm not."
He leaned toward her, squinting. His eyes were a little foggy and there was something strange about the shape of his facial bones, as though they had been hastily reassembled after being dropped. "You're not Lena," he said again, "I thought you were Lena."
She took a shaky breath. "I'm . . . I'm new."
He nodded solemnly, as though she had answered some troubling question, but he still wore a worried look. "I thought you were her. I was . . . I was just teasing. I didn't mean nothing. Me and Lena, we have a joke like that." He lifted his hand and briefly chewed on one finger. "Who are you? You're not mad at me, are you?"
"No, I'm not mad at you." She felt her pulse slow a little. She remembered seeing milky eyes like his in an accident victim who had gone through a sight-saving operation. Whatever was going on, the man didn't seem like a security guard who had just caught an intruder. She finally noticed the object behind him that her eyes had flicked across several times in the last seconds while searching for an escape route—a rolling plastic bucket and long-handled mop. He was a janitor of some kind.
"That's good. I was just playing a joke, because I thought you were Lena." He smiled tentatively. "You're new, huh? What's your name? I'm Jerome."
She briefly considered lying to him, but decided that it would do little good—either he would report an unauthorized person in the basement, or he wouldn't: the name she gave would make little difference if people started looking for her in earnest. "My name is Olga, Jerome. It's nice to meet you."
He nodded his head. It was. A moment later, he squinted again. "What are you doing? Did you lose something?"
Her heart pit-pattered again. The door to the duct still hung open behind her. She turned as casually as she could and pushed it shut, searching desperately for something to tell him. "Mice," she said at last. "I thought I heard mice."
Jerome's eyes got big. "Down here? I never seen any down here." He frowned. "Should I put down some traps, maybe? We had to do that for the roaches. I don't like roaches."
"That sounds like a good idea, Jerome." She stood up, brushing herself off, forcing herself to speak slowly and calmly. "I should get back to work upstairs."
"So isn't Lena coming in this weekend?"
Olga had no idea who Lena was, and now regretted having given her name—Jerome might not be too curious, but this Lena might be. "I don't know. If I see her, I'll tell her you were asking. But I've got to get back to work now."
"Okay." He frowned again, thinking. She took the opportunity to make her way past him toward the basement stairs. "Olga?"
She let out a breath and stopped. "Yes?"
"If you see Lena, maybe you better not tell her. See, I'm not supposed to be down here yet. 'Cause I'm supposed to do the other floor first. But I heard her down here—no, I heard you down here, huh? So I came down to do a joke on her. But Mr. Kingery might be mad if he knew I came down here to do a joke on Lena."
"I won't tell anyone, Jerome. Nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you. You can come down sometime when it's time to have a break. I eat my dinner down here—except it's really breakfast, I guess, because I eat it in the morning. . . ."
"That would be nice, Jerome." She waved and hurried up the stairs, unmuting the t-jack as soon as she reached the next level.
". . . Olga, can you hear me? Can you hear me?"
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, drawing the first deep breath she had taken in minutes. "I can hear you. It is okay. A janitor surprised me. I think he might be . . . how do you say it? A little slow."
"Are you on your own now?"
"Yes. But I need to stop and rest. I almost had a heart attack when he grabbed me."
"Grabbed you?"
"Never mind. Let me get my breath back, then I will explain."
"Sorry about all the stairs," Sellars told her. "But if we interfere with the surveillance cameras in the elevators too often, building security might wonder why so many empty elevators are going up and down."
"I . . . understand." But it didn't make it any easier not to fall over in a faint.
"Catch your breath. The plans I'm looking at say the patch room is on this floor."
She peered into the hallway in time to see a flirt of color at the end of the hall as someone stepped into the elevator. She froze, waiting, but no one got out, which was good. Sellars could hide her movements by looping the output from a security camera, but only if the corridor was deserted first. It wouldn't do to have people suddenly vanishing when they entered one end and then reappearing at the other end.
The elevator door whispered shut. Now the corridor was silent again, the long stretch of dark carpet empty as a country road at night.
Sellars' long-distance manipulation of her badge worked as well for the patch room door as it had for basement access. He had begun to loop the surveillance signals in the room even before she entered, s
o after the door hissed open she stepped in quickly and shut the door behind her. The room, a walkway a hundred meters long with machines in racks standing on either side like the monuments of dead kings, was surprisingly cold.
"I won't keep you here any longer than I have to," Sellars told her. "So let's get to work."
She found the machine he wanted after a few minutes' search, holding up her ring to give him a chance to double-check. She took the gray rectangle out of her backpack. "Do I push it into one of these holes?"
"No, just set it against the ends of those bits sticking out, then square it up. May I see? Excellent. Now hold it flat." There was a click; the gray box vibrated for a moment under Olga's hand. "You can let go now." She did. The box remained in place. "Why don't you go sit somewhere—out of view of the door, just to be on the safe side. This will take me a short while."
Olga found an old swivel chair in a niche behind some of the equipment and collapsed into it gratefully. There was nothing to do but stare at the rows and rows of almost featureless machines. She might have dozed for a few minutes. When she woke up she was shivering from the chill and Sellars was again in her ear.
"There's something wrong."
She was suddenly alert, heart speeding. "Someone is coming?"
"No. It's just . . . this is the wrong room. The wrong equipment. As far as I can tell, none of this machinery has any connection to the Grail Network. It's all just the regular J Corporation telecom infrastructure. There's got to be another plan room—something very large."
"So what do we do now?" She was tired and could not help feeling a little resentful. It was one thing to turn your destiny over to mysterious strangers, but when those strangers had apparently sent you on a wild goose chase, it was another thing altogether.
"I truly don't know, Olga. I'll have to spend some time on the problem. I'll come back to you in one hour. In the meantime, take the tap off that machinery, then I think you should go to that storage room we talked about and wait. I've keyed your badge for it. If you go now, you can be there in five minutes. I'll massage the stair cameras."
"More stairs."
"I'm afraid so."
The storage room took up much of a floor, a huge warren full of stacks of unopened shipping boxes and unused furniture. Once Sellars looped the surveillance signal, Olga made her way to a far corner and settled herself behind a set of privacy screens in the most comfortable executive chair she could find.
She dozed again, and woke up thinking how strange it was that she should be here in the very center of the black tower, the thing she had seen in so many dreams, and yet the children who had led her to this place had vanished like shadows in the sun. The silence in her head was almost painful.
There was silence of another kind, too. She checked her internal display. Almost two hours gone. Sellars or Catur Ramsey should have called her by now. She stood and stretched, limbering herself, then found the storage facility's restroom. When she had finished, she called Sellars. There was no answer. She called Ramsey but he wasn't answering either, so she left a message for him.
It's a hard problem, this one, she guessed, and settled in to wait a bit longer.
Two hours turned into three. Olga felt a cold certainty settle on her like mist. They weren't going to call. Something was wrong—very wrong.
Four hours became five, then six. The dim safety lights high overhead continued in permanent twilight. The stacks of boxes stretched away like dozens of cardboard Stone-henges, stashed and forgotten by busy Druids. Olga's certainty had hardened into something frozen and miserable.
She was alone in the middle of the black tower. First the children had left her, now Ramsey and the man Sellars. She had been deserted again.
"I can make no sense of it," Sellars finished.
Ramsey tried to look helpfully attentive, but Sellars' explanation had lost him some time back. "Well, there must be some other equipment in the building somewhere."
"No," the old man said, "it's not that simple. All the data lines from that building come out of that patch room and get handed over to the telecom providers. And every thing in the building—even Jongleur's private offices and residence at the top of the tower—pumps out through those lines. I couldn't be missing anything as significant as the amount of throughput needed to manage the Grail network. It would be like hiding the data from all of NASA."
"Nassau?" Ramsey frowned. "The Bahamas?"
"Never mind. Before your time." Sellars took a moment to inhale through a chemical-scented rag clutched in his knobby hand, a rag that had begun to seem as much a part of him as the kerchief of a Versailles courtier. Ramsey thought the old man's breathing seemed worse just in the last two days, and could not help wondering how long a being so frail could endure this kind of stress. "But I must come up with something," Sellars continued. "Your Ms. Pirofsky is waiting patiently for a call back."
"I don't understand. You've already hacked into the Otherland system, haven't you? So why can't you find it now?"
"Because I've never been able to hack into it from Felix Jongleur's end." Sellars sighed and lowered the rag. "That's why I thought Olga's . . . incursion, for lack of a better word, might prove to be a help. I've never been able to touch the operating system, no matter what I tried. I got into the network through the Telemorphix end, where the gross maintenance of the system is done. I've been in and out of Telemorphix at will for years. I might as well be drawing a paycheck." His smile was perfunctory.
Ramsey shrugged. "So what do we do?"
"I don't know. I just. . . ." For a moment he physically faltered, then raised a shaking hand to his face as though surprised to find his head still attached. "Time is pressing now. And there are other things pulling at my attention. Any one of them might be crucial."
"Can I do anything to help?"
"Possibly. Just having you listening . . . it forces me . . . it forces me to make a little order out of the chaos. Sometimes we think we know things too well, and it's only when we try to explain them. . . ." He straightened. "Look. I will show you one of the matters that is tugging at me most strongly."
The wallscreen sprang to life in a blaze of pure light. Ramsey jumped. A moment later, the image resolved into the tangle of strange greenery that Sellars called his Garden.
"I've seen this before," Ramsey said gently.
"Not this you haven't." Sellars gestured and part of the picture jumped forward into magnified resolution. A cluster of fungus, gray and sickly, but still somehow with the shine of a new thing, had erupted from the ground around the base of one of the more complicated plants. "It just happened today, while I was working with Olga. I had all kinds of alarm messages waiting for me when I got off the line with her."
"What is it?"
"It's the operating system," Sellars said. "The Grail network operating system. Or rather, it's a pattern that looks like what the operating system does when it singles something within the network out for attention—a sort of locus of special interest."
"I have no idea what any of that means," Ramsey said, "but I guess I'm learning to be comfortable with complete and chronic ignorance. And I have to say that I'm impressed—you're the first person I've ever heard actually use the word 'locus' in conversation."
He won another smile from the old man. "What it means is that for the first time since the system went haywire, for lack of a better word, I've found a symptom of the operating system within the network. Well, the operating system is everywhere in the network, of course, but the part of it that seems intelligent, that seems to make actual choices, has been absent since things broke down. Now it's back."
"And that means. . . ?"
"In the past, as I think I told you, it was the method I used to locate my volunteers within the network. So perhaps what this concentration of attention represents is the location of the poor people I've put into danger—the people who have been hidden from me for days." He closed his eyes, thinking. "One of the reasons I wanted to get into the
system from Jongleur's end was so I could bypass the network's very fierce security and have a proper chance to search for them myself. And there they are—maybe. God only knows how long this opportunity will last."
"Sounds like you need to try to contact them again,"
"I agree—if I can get in. As I think I told you, the system hasn't even allowed me to sneak Cho-Cho into the network the last few times I've tried." He paused for a moment, consulting some private source of information. "I have half an hour before I told Ms. Pirofsky I'd get back to her. That should be plenty of time for the attempt, even if it's successful—I've never been able to hold off the network security systems for more than a few minutes." He nodded toward the door separating their room from the Sorensens'. "I'll need your help. It may work differently when the boy's not asleep."
"The boy?"
"Of course, the boy. I doubt things have changed enough for the system to allow me in by myself." He inhaled from the cloth again. "But as I said, it may work differently this time—I've never tried it when Cho-Cho was awake. You can make sure he doesn't fall off the couch."
All three Sorensens stood in the doorway, watching with the sickened fascination of bystanders at the scene of an accident, even though nothing had happened yet. Christabel in particular looked frightened, and Ramsey felt a sudden tug of shame. As grown-ups, they had all failed these two kids pretty thoroughly, at least when it came to shielding them from life's uglier moments.
"Oh, for goodness' sake," Sellars said testily. "I can't get anything accomplished with you all hovering over me. Leave me alone with the boy. Mr. Ramsey will be able to help me if I need anything."
"I still don't understand what you're going to do to him, but I know I don't like it," Kaylene Sorensen declared. "Just because he's a poor little Mexican boy. . . ."
Ramsey saw Sellars bristle. "Madam, he's as much an American as you are, and certainly has a greater claim to it than I do, since I wasn't even born here." His glare softened. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Sorensen. You have every right to be worried. I apologize. I am . . . very tired. Please try not to worry. We have done this several times, Cho-Cho and I. But I do need some privacy so I can concentrate. Time is growing short. Please."
