by Tad Williams
Sam could not take her eyes from what was happening, even as she felt the others crowding up behind her. It was a dream, a nightmare—Orlando! Fighting for his life!
But there was something different about him, she saw now—not just his speed but even his shape. The body he wore was not the Thargor of the last days gaming in the Middle Country, the scarred, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred wars, nor even the younger version of the character he had become when they first crossed into the Grail network. This new Thargor was still muscular but lithe and lighter of foot than he had ever been in the Middle Country, as though Sam watched a version of the character she had never seen—a stripling Thargor that had existed only in Orlando's imagination.
The greater weight of the older versions might have been a useful advantage, for now the Jack Sprat creature surprised him with a backhanded blow and lifted him completely off his feet, smashing him to the earth just a few meters from the quivering form of the wife-thing. The second monster slithered forward with surprising speed then rose and folded over him like a huge, living jelly. For a heart-tripping moment Sam thought Orlando had disappeared into the immense mouth; instead the blade of his sword suddenly poked out through the side of the thing's head and it contracted away from the attack, roaring liquidly. Orlando had thrown himself to one side to avoid its killing stoop and now managed to jackknife away from a follow-up swipe by Jack Sprat, which had hurried forward to grab him while he was engaged with its blubberous companion.
The wife, its head streaming with fluids from its wound, attacked again, catching him between the two of them. Both creatures had learned their lesson and moved in on him with greater caution. He backed away, trying to lengthen the triangle, but he had the Well behind him and was running out of room.
Sam's joy had turned to helpless misery. There was no way he could beat them both. She was watching him die all over again. She hit out at the hands restraining her but her friends would not let go. "Run!" she screamed. "Run, Orlando!"
He took a last step backward. As his heel teetered on the edge of the Well he threw a quick glance back at its flickering impermanence. His measured but fearful gaze was enough to tell Sam a terrible truth: he had come out of it, but he could not go back into it and survive.
He'll break up again if he goes in, she thought wildly—he'll disappear. She did not know how she knew it but she was certain: there was not enough energy left in the Well to make him again.
Make him? But that's Orlando, it really is Orlando. . . !
The Jack Sprat creature limped toward him on its wounded legs, swinging its arms like giant brooms, trying nothing more ambitious than to force him over the rim of the pit. With no room left he did the only thing he could: he leaped forward between the flailing hands and rolled into the thing's scrawny legs like a bowling ball. A leg cracked with a dry pop and the monster tottered, giving out a whistling shriek of rage. It staggered, hobbled a step, and as it regained its balance began to reach down, but Orlando was behind it now. He chopped through the wounded leg with a two-handed stroke. As it teetered on its remaining leg he threw his weight against it and shoved it toward the Well.
Jack Sprat toppled over the edge, but managed to sink its fingers into the soft soil and cling, its long legs kicking above the roiling waters. It had even begun to pull itself back up but Orlando dodged a hammering, sideways blow from the other beast and hacked the grasping fingers into splinters. Jack Sprat slid into the pulsing depths, shrieking and whistling like a boiling lobster, then surfaced for a moment with arms thrashing before it dissolved at last into the glimmering substance of the Well.
The monstrous, gelatinous form of the wife-thing humped up behind Orlando, spluttering in fury. He had only a fraction of an instant to jump away as it smashed down like a titan fist made of putty. It oozed quickly to the side to trap him against the precipice then stretched upward again, its mouth hanging open in an idiot gape that made it look like some kind of giant, cancerous sock puppet. Before it could drop and crush him Orlando shoved the blade of his sword deep into its bulk, then struggled around to one side, dragging the blade with him, his long muscles knotting as he pulled it through the rubbery flesh even as the creature folded down on top of him.
Sam's heart stuttered and seemed to stop entirely until Orlando scrabbled back out from under the bulky thing, covered with its slime. The sound of the creature's anger went sharper in pitch, into pain and even fright. It heaved upward again but something viscous was running out of the long jagged hole across its middle. Jack Sprat's wife swayed, grew slack as a deflating balloon, then collapsed and slid over the edge in a wet, sticky glob and vanished into the Well.
Sam was already up and running, forcing her way through the stunned refugees, leaping over the dead and dying without any thought for them at all. Orlando turned away from the edge of the Well, staggered, and fell to his knees.
"Orlando!" she screamed. "Oh, dzang, Gardiner, is it really you?" She crouched and wrapped her arms around him. "Don't die, you better not die! Oh, God, I knew you couldn't be dead. You came back! Like Gandalf! You utterly came back!"
He turned his head to look at her. For a moment he seemed to be looking at a stranger and her stomach contracted. Then he smiled. It was a miserable, weary smile, but she thought it was the most wonderful thing she had seen in her whole life. "But I am dead, Frederico," he said. "I really am."
"No, you're not!" She hugged him as hard as she could. She was weeping, babbling—she didn't care, she didn't know anything, he was alive, alive! The others were running toward them but she did not want to let go, ever. "No, you're not. You're here."
After a long moment he pulled back a little. "Gandalf?" He peered at her, tried to blink away his own tears, then laughed. "Damn, you did read it. You read it but you never told me. You are such a scanmaster, Fredericks." And then he collapsed in her arms.
CHAPTER 42
Old School
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons
(visual: new facility at Totness)
VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.
(visual: Vicenta Omarid, Vice-chairman, Resist!)
OMARID: "Our country is not a dumping ground for toxic waste or toxic humanity. This is a cynical exploitation by the first world nations of their own people and ours, an attempt to hide the consequences of their own jail-the-poor policies by waving money under the noses of hungry nations like Trinidad and Tobago. . . ."
* * *
At first Sellars had no idea where he was. He was sunk deep in a padded seat that felt more like a womb than a chair, surrounded, comforted, connected. The great window before him was full of burning points of light and he could feel the almost silent vibration of engines—no, not just feel the vibrations, he realized, but discern the actual working of the antiproton drive, every detail of its performance as well as the ship's million other functions, all flooding into his altered nervous system. He was flying through the stars.
"It's the Sally Ride," he murmured. My ship. . . ! My beautiful ship.
But something was wrong.
How did I get here? Memories were seeping back now, a kaleidoscope of days, of fire and terror followed by years of isolation. Of a past in which this silver seed had been blasted to twisted wreckage in a hangar in South Dakota without ever having flown outside the lower thermosphere.
But the stars. . . ! There they are, bigger than life. Could it be that everything else I thought was real, the destruction of PEREGRINE, my long imprisonment, wax it all just a dream—a cold-sleep nightmare?
He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it so badly he could taste it. If this were real then even the nightmare of five crippled decades would soon evaporate, leaving him alone with his ship
and the endless fields of starlight.
"No," he said aloud. "This isn't real. You got past my defenses. You've taken this out of my own head somehow."
For a long moment he heard nothing but the hum of the ship's engines. The stars swung past the window like flurrying snow. Then the ship spoke.
"Stay," it said. "Stay with . . . this one." He had heard the voice before, of course, during countless tests—the strangely sexless, computer-generated tones of his own starship. "This one is lonely."
Something caught at his heart. After it was destroyed in the Sand Creek disaster he had pushed the ship from his thoughts like a dead lover. Even to hear its voice after all these years was a miracle. But he was troubled by the words. Did the Grail Network operating system which had built this dream in his head really only want to talk? Sellars had fought the thing for so long that he found that almost impossible to believe, "I Know this isn't real," he said, "but why are you doing it? Why didn't you just kill me when you broke through into my mind?"
"You . . . are different," said the mechanical ship-voice. Outside the thick window, the snowflake stars continued to wheel past. "Made of light and numbers. Like this one."
My wiring—my internal systems. Does it really think I'm the same kind of thing as it? Could it really just be looking for a . . . a kindred soul? He could not believe that was all there was—the operating system had sensed him long ago, had been studying him through each incursion as carefully as he had studied it. Why had it waited so long to contact him? Was it only that its own defenses had prevented it? Or was something else going on?
Sellars was baffled and exhausted. The seductiveness of the dream, the granting of this fondest wish, which had turned to ashes so long ago, was making it hard to concentrate.
"The stars," the thing said as if it sensed his thought. "You know the stars?"
"I used to," Sellars said. "I thought I would spend my life among them."
"Very lonely," the ship's voice said.
That at least had been real. No mere shipspeak program could manufacture a crippled bleakness like that. "Some people don't think so," he said, almost kindly.
"Lonely. Empty. Cold."
Sellars was drawn to respond—it was hard to hear such childlike despair and not. say something—but as the strangeness of the experience began to wear away the illogic continued to disturb him.
If all it wanted was to talk to me, why now? It was able to reach outside its network a long time ago—just look at the way it manifested in Mister J's, the way it's begun to explore other real-world systems. Why didn't it just contact me, instead of waiting until I was trying to enter the Grail network? In fact, even if it had to wait until I entered the network, why did it wait until this particular moment—I've been in the network many times. He tried to piece together what had happened just before the contact. We were struggling, or at least I was struggling with its security routines. Then I left it so I could go and open the data tap . . . all that information from the Grail network, that massive, overwhelming flow . . . and that was the moment it attacked me again. Pushed past my defenses.
When I opened the data tap.
"You, this one—we are the same," the ship-voice said suddenly. It almost sounded frightened.
"You've been using me, haven't you?" Sellars nodded. "You clever bastard. You waited until I broke into Jongleur's system, then piggybacked in on my access. There was something there you couldn't manage on your own, wasn't there? Something expressly designed to keep you out. And you needed me alive and connected until you could get into it." With that understanding came a deeper fear. What had his adversary fought so hard and so craftily to reach? What was it doing even now, while it entertained him with recreated memories?
And what would it do to him when it didn't need him any longer?
"No. Lonely in the dark. Don't want to be here anymore." The mechanical voice was becoming increasingly distorted.
"Then let me help you," Sellars begged. "You said that I am like you. Give me a chance! I want what you want—I want the children to be safe."
"Not safe," it whispered. Even the stars were growing faint beyond the window, as though the Sally Ride was now outracing their ancient light. "Too late. Too late for the children."
"Which children?" he asked sharply.
"All the children."
"What have you done?" Sellars demanded. "How did you use me? If you tell me, there might still be some way for me to help you—or at least help the children."
"No help," it said sadly, then began to sing in a mournful, halting voice.
"An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me. . . ."
Sellars had never heard the words or the simple tune. "I don't understand—just tell me what you've done. Why did you keep me here? What have you done?"
It began to sing again. This time, Sellars recognized the song.
"Rock-a-bye, baby, in the treetop. . . ."
And then the ship was gone, the stars were gone, everything was gone, and he fell back into the familiar confines of his Garden.
But it was a garden no longer, or at least not the comfortable, curved space he had nurtured for so long. Now it stretched for what looked like kilometers, vaster than the grounds at Kensington or Versailles, an almost impossible riot of greenery spreading in all directions.
It held together, Sellars realized. My Garden absorbed the Grail network information and held together. And I am still alive, too. The Other did whatever it wanted to do and then it released me. He checked to make sure his connection to the network was still open, that he still had contact with Cho-Cho, and was filled with relief to discover he did.
So what did the operating system do? he wondered. What did it want?
He flung himself into the acres of data, quantities of information that might take a team of specialists years to analyze properly. But there was only Sellars, and he did not have years or even months. In fact, he suspected he might only have a day or two left before things fell apart completely.
The revelations, at least some of them, came swiftly. As he examined the most recent events concerning the Grail network, for speed's sake tracking just through what had happened since he himself had opened the data tap, then delving frantically in the Grail Brotherhood's files to confirm his suspicions, he discovered what the operating system was and what it had done.
It was worse than he could have imagined. He did not have days. If he was lucky, he might have three hours to save his friends and countless other innocents.
If he was insanely lucky, he might have four.
They made themselves another camp of sorts among the ruins of Azador's Gypsy settlement. The shattered frames of the wagons loomed in the half-light like the skeletons of strange animals. Bodies of fairy-tale creatures lay everywhere, broken and dismembered. Many of the remains had been claimed and had been dragged away by friends and the Gypsies had laid out their own fallen kin at the edge of camp, covering the bodies with colorful blankets, but dozens of corpses still lay unmourned and unburied. Paul could scarcely bear to look. It was a blessing, in a way, that the Well was dying, the light fading.
The waters were almost entirely dark, the radiance that had once danced there only a flicker now; it barely touched the cocoon of cloudy gray overhead, so that even the few campfires seemed to give out more light than the Well. The growing shadow on both sides of the barrier held one other benefit: Paul had no doubt that Dread still waited beyond the cloud-wall, but at least they didn't have to watch that man-shaped point of infinite night pacing calmly back and forth on the other side anymore.
Out of his childhood a snatch of the Bible came to him. "Whence comest thou?" Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, "From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in if."
But there are two Satans in this universe, Paul thought. And one of them is in here. With us.
He stared at Felix Jongleur who, like Paul, sat some distance from the fire and the other survivors. Jo
ngleur stared back. Their companions seemed far more interested in Orlando, who had not yet regained consciousness. But except for having been dead—something Paul thought was usually considered a fairly serious medical problem—the boy seemed to be suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion.
Nobody cares about me, he thought. Except the man who tried to kill me. But why should they care? They don't know what I know.
It had all come back—not just the terrible last moments in the tower, but with it all the little missing pieces, the day-to-day boredom and routine, everything that had been hidden from him by the post-hypnotic block.
"She's dead," he said to Jongleur. "Ava's been dead all along, hasn't she?"
"Then your memories are unlocked." Jongleur spoke slowly. "Yes, she is dead."
"So why was she here? Why did she keep . . . appearing to me?" He looked over at the others huddled around Orlando. They were only a few meters away but he felt so disconnected from them it could have been a Hundred times that. "Is it something like what happened to that boy—to Orlando Gardiner?"
Jongleur gave him a brief appraising glance. Even the firelight sparkling in his eyes did not make him look more alive. He looks like something stuffed, Paul thought. Something with glass eyes. Dead eyes.
"I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."
"Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.
"From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.
