by Tad Williams
The Stone Girl tugged her arm again. "Look at the stars," the little girl said, her voice a choked whisper.
The sky was darkening from the long twilight into true night, but the stars were not getting brighter. Instead, they were fading. The evening sky was turning black and the starlight was dying, plunging all the land around the Well into deepest shadow.
CHAPTER 36
Without a Net
* * *
NETFEED/ADVERTISEMENT: ANVAC Spells "Trust"
(visual: scenes of dogs, children, and suburban houses and parks)
VO: There's a lot of silliness going around these days, but when people call our company secretive, or arrogant, or vindictive, well, that's just going too darn far. Our business is to protect people. Yes, some of our clients are world leaders in politics and business, but a lot of them are just average people like you. Good people. People who know that happiness comes from security, and security comes from ANVAC.
A lot of people have asked, "What does your name mean? Do the letters stand for something?" But you know, that's not really anyone else's business. We're a privately-held corporation, and just as you wouldn't want anyone to come into your house and read your old letters, we have a right to privacy, too. It's enough to know that what we stand for is the right of our customers to be safe, and that is what the letters A-N-V-A-C really spell is "trust'
* * *
She stood paralyzed on the platform, watching the arc of the trapeze as it sailed out toward her, paused, then swung back into the shadows at the top of the big tent. She knew that she must leap out and catch it on the next swing or else she would never reach it, would be stuck on the high platform forever. But she knew just as firmly that there was no net, and that a fall onto the sawdust-caked center ring beneath her, invisible in the glare of the spotlights, would be like an eighty-foot swan dive onto cement.
The trapeze swung toward her again and its slightly diminished arc confirmed that she would get no more chances. She tensed her muscles and felt the edge of the platform through the soles of the soft shoes, letting herself lean forward against every shrieking instinct until her balance was compromised and there was no turning back. As the bar neared the end of its swing, slowing to the moment when it would finally stop and hang in space for a fraction of a second, she leaped outward into the pillars of light, the unending dark.
Only as she touched the rung, clutched, and felt it squirt from her grasp like a bar of soap—only in that moment when she too was briefly weightless, but with all of death and eternity solidifying around her, changing her from a person into a mere proof of gravity—did Olga realize she was dreaming. The dream-audience bellowed in distorted surprise and terror, deafening her even as she fell, then she was gasping on the floor of the storeroom where she had fallen asleep, shivering and struggling to catch her breath as the air-conditioning vent above her head roared like a jet engine.
By the time she had found the water fountain and taken a long drink the trembling was beginning to subside. Some deep frequency in the air-conditioning was starting to make her feel ill, so she picked up her belongings and moved to the other side of the storeroom.
The unintended nap had done little to make her feel better. She could still feel the moment of slippage and freefall, something that even after years of working over a net, practicing with her father and his aerialists, never completely lost its terror.
Wouldn't be much of a circus unless there is a chance someone might die.
Strangely, the thought gave her a little comfort. Nothing was assured in that life or this: even a safety net was no guarantee. Jansci, the Hungarian wire-walker, a good friend of her father's, had fallen to the net during practice, caught his foot as he was bouncing up, and had somehow gone over the edge. A mere fifteen-foot fall, but it had paralyzed him.
No guarantee, even with a net.
She drank a little more water, then tried Catur Ramsey's line again, but whatever magic had once connected her through the telematic jack to the real world outside this artificial black mountain was gone. The coach was a pumpkin once more, the footmen had become mice. She would have to do it on her own.
She packed her meager belongings and headed for the service elevator.
Almost a full day of living like a rat in the walls of Felix Jongleur's house had made her cautious. When the elevator hissed open on the mezzanine floor she peered around the edge before stepping out, then shrank back into the interior until the young man at the end of the corridor had rounded the corner and disappeared. He was wearing a collarless shirt and work pants, but seemed more like a business employee in casual clothes than a custodial worker—perhaps a young manager on the way up, anxious to impress the bosses with unpaid overtime.
Even the minions of Hell don't have to dress up on weekends, she decided. I don't remember Mr. Dante mentioning that.
As she held the door open and waited a few extra moments for safety, she could not help thinking about the dozens of oh-so-ordinary employees she had seen around the building, all doing oh-so-ordinary things. In fact, she had seen no evidence that her own reasons for being here were anything but delusional. J Corporation headquarters, once she was past its forbidding black facade, held nothing she could not have found in any downtown skyscraper. Even the hardened office for the squad of security guards was not excessive if you considered that the building was also the residence of one of the world's richest men.
Any reasonable person would have to admit that the fantasies of lost children and worldwide conspiracies seemed more and more farfetched—and Olga herself was a reasonable person.
Can you be reasonable and still be insane? she wondered. That would seem to be stretching the rules a bit.
When she felt certain the hallway was empty, she made her way down the stairs from the mezzanine onto the ground floor of the vast, pyramid-roofed lobby. Although she had seen several people crossing from one elevator bank to another, at the moment it was empty—almost shockingly so, in the way only a closed public building can seem. She hurried across the black marble floor toward the main reception desk, the echo of her footsteps sounding as loud as gunfire. When she reached the desk she made a show for the hidden cameras of accidentally tipping a square vase of flowers across the countertop, so that the water and the fading irises from Friday morning splashed out onto the floor in front of the desk. Pretending she had not noticed what she'd done, she hurried back up to the comparative safety of the mezzanine.
From a secure place in a copse of potted ornamental trees she waited and watched as an agonizingly slow trickle of J Corporation workers checked in through the inset security door for some weekend catch-up, or wandered across the lobby from one part of the building to the other. Several of them seemed to notice the pool of water and spilled flowers in front of the desk, but if any of them decided to notify someone about it they used their telematic jack to do so. Olga had no way of knowing for sure.
An hour went by. Somewhere between twenty and thirty employees had trekked across the lobby but the spilled vase still lay untended. The huge clock on the wall, a rectangle of gold the size of a panel truck inset with Egyptian figures and characters, showed a few minutes past eight o'clock. Saturday night, her time almost half gone, and nothing accomplished. Olga had always been a patient woman, but now she felt herself stretched like a thin cord, vibrating in every breeze, poised to snap. She had all but decided that she would have to take the risk of exposing herself on a search of the lower floors when a gangly figure shuffled out of the service elevator and across the lobby floor pushing a plastic bin on wheels, a mop resting on one shoulder like a sentry's rifle.
Relieved, Olga let out a long-held sigh of breath. She watched for a moment as the custodian gathered up the fallen irises with slow, careful movements, then lowered the mop. When she was sure she was right—who knew how many custodians actually worked here on weekends?—she hurried to the elevator and got in. A minute later it was summoned to the lobby level. She did her best
to look surprised when he got in.
"Well, hello, Jerome," she said as he bumped his bin over the tiny gap between car and door. She gave him her best smile. "What are you doing up here?"
"I don't know anything about that, Olga." He spoke mildly, but was clearly troubled. "All those floors are closed. I only been up there when the security fellows ask me to come help move something." He sat thinking with his mouth open and his milky eyes almost shut, half a sandwich in his hand, arrested on its upward journey.
Olga forced herself to take a bite of the liverwurst sandwich he had insisted she share. Since she had vetoed eating in the custodians' lunchroom, convincing him instead to join her in the storage room—she had spent so much time there it was beginning to feel like home—she had not felt it polite to turn down the sandwich, despite her extremely mixed feelings about liverwurst, "So . . . so you've been to those floors?"
"Oh, sure. Lots of times. But only up to the security office." He frowned again. "Once to the room above that where they have all these machines, because one of the bosses was angry there was mouse poop there and he wanted to show me. But I told him I didn't even clean that room, so how was I supposed to know there were mice up there?" He laughed, then embarrassedly cleaned a morsel of liverwurst from his chin. "Lena said the mice were going up in the elevator! That was really funny."
Olga tried to suppress her almost panicky interest in this second machine room. What good would it do her, in any case? She had no idea how to attach Sellars' device, or what to attach it to, and no Sellars to benefit from its use anyway. But it was in the part of the tower she wanted to visit. "So could you take me up there?"
He shook his head. "We're not supposed to. We'll get in trouble."
"But I told you, if I don't, I'll get in trouble."
"I still don't understand," he said, chewing vigorously again.
"I told you, my friend from the other shift took me up there Friday, just to show it to me. But I dropped my wallet up there, you see? By accident. And if someone finds it I will get in trouble. And I also won't have my cards for shopping and things."
"You'd get in trouble, huh?"
"Yes. They will fire me for sure. And I won't be able to help my daughter and her little girl." Olga was torn between self-loathing and increasing desperation. Nobody but a man with some serious thinking problems would buy an ill-concocted story like this. She was taking advantage of Jerome because he was credulous and eager to please—probably brain-damaged—and she felt like the lowest scum imaginable. Only by thinking of the dream-children as though the memories were a mantra, of the way they had flocked to her like frightened birds seeking shelter, their imploring, hopeless voices, could she ease the pain of what she was doing.
"Maybe . . . maybe we could just tell some of the fellows in security," Jerome said at last. "They're pretty nice guys, really. They could get it for you."
"No!" She softened her tone and tried again. "No, they would have to file a report, otherwise they'd get in trouble, see? Then the friend who took me up there would get in trouble, too. I don't want someone else to get fired because of a mistake I made."
"You're a nice person, Olga."
She winced, but tried to keep her smile. "Is there anything you can do, Jerome?"
He was clearly very distressed by the idea of breaking the rules, but she could see him thinking carefully. "I could try, but I don't know if the elevator will open. Which floor did you lose your wallet on?"
"The one with the machines."' It seemed likely to be the most sparsely occupied, and there might be a way to get to the other floors—didn't even the highest-security, most supervillainish buildings still legally have to have stairways and fire escapes? As for how to get rid of Jerome so she could investigate in peace, she would have to think of something on the fly.
Maybe you could club him unconscious when you get there, Olga, she thought sourly. Just to make the whole thing complete.
Jerome put the rest of his sandwich back in the vacuum bag and carefully sealed it. He seemed to have lost his appetite. "We can go up and see, Olga. But if it doesn't work, don't get mad at me, okay?"
"I promise." And may God forgive me for this, she thought.
Ramsey looked around the room, trying to take it all in. Even for a virtual environment, where gravity was not an issue and cubic footage was equally an illusion, it was insanely cluttered. A grisly pile of heads in transparent boxes, a collection of human and nonhuman trophies more like flash-freeze holograms than actual decapitations, dominated the multilevel space, but there was plenty of competition. Strange objects were stacked everywhere, swords and spears and complete sets of armor, gems the size of Catur Ramsey's virtual fist, huge skulls of animals that could never, thank God, have actually lived in the real world, even a banister that was a huge, immobilized snake with a head half as long as Ramsey was tall. The walls, where they could be seen between the leaning piles of memorabilia, showed two scenes whose complete disparity were the only reason Ramsey knew they were displays rather than what was supposed to be outside Orlando Gardiner's electronic home in the Inner District.
The Cretaceous swamp, where even now a mother Hadrosaur was chasing away a slender Dromeosaurus that had made a couple of halfhearted lunges toward her eggs, was a pretty obvious thing for a kid to be interested in; the other, a vast and seemingly lifeless landscape of red dust was a little less understandable.
All in all, it was a boy's room in a place with no limits, and these were the proud possessions of a boy who would never come back to claim them. Ramsey could not help thinking of the child-king Tutankhamen, his tomb stuffed with personal effects dug open and exposed to view millennia after his death. Would Orlando's room just remain on the net? He supposed the Gardiners would have to keep paying for it. But what if they did? Would someone stumble across it generations in the future and try to make sense of the mind and world of a forgotten child from the twenty-first century? It was a strange and pitiful thought, a life in all its complexity reduced to a few toys and souvenirs.
Well, maybe not a few. . . .
A hole opened in the floor and something like the head of a ragged black dust mop emerged, accompanied by a cloud of cartoon dust.
"Thanks for meeting me here," Beezle said.
"No problem. Is this. . . ." He wanted to ask if the place was special to the agent, but again found himself confused. It wasn't even like Beezle was a real artificial personality. He was a kid's toy, essentially. "Do you come here a lot?"
Beezle's goggling eyes rolled and then settled. His answer was strangely hesitant. "I know where everything is. So it's a good place. To do things."
"Right." Ramsey looked around for someplace to sit. The only obvious thing designed for human comfort was a hammock stretched in one corner.
"You want a chair?" Beezle reached down into the hole in the floor and, with a few strange sound effects, produced a chair three or four times his own size. "Si'down. I'll tell you what I found."
As Ramsey made himself comfortable, Beezle produced a small black cube, then flicked it so that it opened into a foggy three-dimensional shape that hung in the middle of the room. A moment later the fog inside dispersed, revealing a tall black object.
"That's the J Corporation building."
"Yep." Beezle tapped the transparent cube and the building opened like a paper book, revealing its interior. "This is from that guy Sellars' notes."
"You found them!
"Yep. What is this guy, anyway, a robot or something? He keeps his notes in machine language."
"He's not a robot, as far as I know, but it's a long story and I'm in a hurry. Can you put me back in touch with Olga Pirofsky?"
"You wanna see where she is?" Beezle waved a misshapen foot and a tiny red dot gleamed into view about one third of the way up the structure. "Sellars has a trace on her—she's got a badge or something, right?—and you can track it off the readers they got on all the floors. It's a weak signal, but it's enough to triangulate her."
>
As Ramsey watched, the red dot slowly began to move sideways. She's alive, anyway, he thought. Unless someone's carrying her. "Do Sellars' notes tell you what he planned to do? Something about tapping into the building's data stream, that's all I know."
"Kind of," Beezle said, cabdriver voice suddenly distracted. "Your friend—she's moving."
"I saw. . . ." Ramsey began, then suddenly realized that the red dot had stopped its horizontal movement and was now slowly rising. "Oh, my God, what's happening? What's she doing?"
"Service elevator. She's going up."
"But the top of the building. . . ! That's where Sellars said the private quarters were, and the security guards. I have to stop her!" He had a sudden thought. "Will her badge let her in up there?"
Beezle gave as much of a shrug as a creature with no shoulders and too many legs could manage. "Not unless she's done something to change it. Let me check." After a moment's silence, he said, "Nope. She could stop on the security floor, but if she tries to get out anywhere else above the forty-fifth she's probably gonna set off all the alarms."
"Christ. Can you put me in contact with her?"
"I haven't finished looking through all this stuff yet, but I'll try." Another hole in the floor opened next to Beezle. He made a move toward it, then stopped. "You know they got a whole army base on that island? Why the heck you wanna mess with someplace like that, anyway?"
"Just hook me up!" Ramsey shouted.
Beezle took a few shambling steps and dropped into the pit. Moments later the electronic cottage resounded with the clang of something being hammered and the earsplitting voopa-voopa of a wood saw.
