Sea of Silver Light

by Tad Williams

  He wished now that his own attempts to find and develop another operating system had borne fruit, or even that there had been time to work with Robert Wells to produce a proper alternative system of a more conventional sort, but it was too late for regrets. This was a war—a war for his own network, which had demanded ludicrous quantities of money, sweat, and blood—and in war there would always be casualties.

  The most worrisome thing, of course, was his own safety. He had already been reluctant to commit himself permanently to a virtual body, so how could he trust one of the lesser systems designed by Wells' Telemorphix engineers—more reliable than his own perhaps, but far less sophisticated?

  But if Avialle's copies can survive a system shutdown, he thought, then my waiting virtual body should survive the changeover as well. And if I must risk completing the Grail process, even without entirely trusting the new system—well, I have never been afraid of risk. The events of the past days had been unforeseen; he had come close to despair but he had remained strong. To survive and conquer now he would have to remain smarter and more aggressive than those around him, just as he always did.

  It had not been easy to stay patient-and meek with Jonas and the others, especially when he had known that one of the access devices was again within his easy reach, being carried by the woman Martine. But a single access device had never been of any use to him, or he could have taken Renie Sulaweyo's by force days earlier. He had feared he might somehow have to find his own way into the heart of the system, but luckily that coarse Sulaweyo woman had stumbled into it on her own. Jongleur had only needed to wait until contact was opened between the two devices so he could risk everything on one gamble, praying that when his override command reached Renie Sulaweyo's end of the communication circuit inside the Other, it would force the system's compliance.

  Of course, risk was one thing, foolish risk another: he had prepared for the moment carefully, pretending to help the clownish Azador, quietly urging the pseudo-Gypsy to take back what he stupidly thought was his, so that if the first attempt to steal it should fail, Jongleur himself would still be free to try again.

  In fact, he found it a bit disconcerting to discover how easily he could trick and manipulate another version of himself—even a flawed version. It almost wounded his pride.

  But that was a small detail. Everything had worked just as he had planned. He had waited, gambled, and won.

  And now it is time. Time to play the endgame.

  He ordered initialization of the Apep processes, setting in motion the complicated preparations so that he would be able to trigger it as soon as possible and be done with his rebellious operating system, then he rose out of the empty gray system-space into the reality of his great house.

  Which, to his definite surprise, seemed to be completely empty.

  What is going on here? The building's systems were alive with conflicting alarms—a fire alarm from the underground floors and a secondary alarm warning of a toxic release event from the island's offshore power plant. He brought up his camera-eyes and began to flick through the employee levels. It was Sunday, so of course the building would not be full, but the halls and offices were uniformly deserted. Jongleur put out a priority message to security but no one answered. He brought up the view of the building's security station, two floors below him. It was empty.

  Impossible. Something was very wrong. He sent out an even higher priority message to the island's private military base, but all its lines were engaged. Someone had turned off his connection to the base surveillance cameras as well. He flicked to one of the low-orbit satellites and focused in until he could see movement—a great flurry of movement, in fact, like an ant army on the march. His troops were boarding a line of company ferries. Being evacuated.

  Jongleur could sense the machineries of his heart trying to race, then the equipment compensating. He felt the cool placidity of countervailing chemicals flushing through his system. He found the override controls and turned down the tranquilizing flow: something terrible had happened, was happening right now, and he did not want to be lulled.

  The basement, he thought. That first. He brought up the displays. The bottom of the building was indeed full of smoke—it had clouded the underground floors and leaked all the way up to the atrium lobby—but he could see no sign of flames. He checked the timing on the alarms. Almost two hours since the fire was first detected. Jongleur could make no sense of it. A smoldering fire that was mostly smoke could certainly last that long, but was it enough of a threat to abandon the building completely, let alone the whole island? Where were the fire crews? He asked for a quick analysis of the building's air system and found no unusual readings, no surprise toxins.

  What in hell is going on?

  The reactor incident might have been the answer but the records showed that those alarms had not even been triggered until half an hour after the fire began, although they were almost certainly the reason behind the mass evacuation of the base. It made no sense, though—the power plant was on a tiny offshore island, separate from the main island with its base and tower. Jongleur had wanted a small reactor under his personal control to make sure the narrowcast of the Grail network's operating system always had a source of backup power, but he had not been fool enough to put it next to the corporate offices—next to the place where his own helpless body was kept.

  He brought up a bank of readouts from the power station but they were muddled and inconclusive. An alarm had definitely been sent out and the facility abandoned but he could get no clear picture of what had happened. The visual evidence gave no clues: the reactor itself seemed in perfectly normal condition, and a closer inspection of the reactor management data showed that it was shut down, temperatures normal, and in fact appeared to have been shut down well before its own alarm warnings went out, as though the technicians had responded to some completely separate order, securing the reactor and raising the containment shields before evacuating in an orderly fashion.

  So if the fire was a minor one and the reactor wasn't in danger, why was everybody leaving?

  Could it be one of my enemies? Has Wells also escaped offline? But why would he risk destroying the entire network, risk his own massive investment, just to strike at me?

  Dread. It came to him like a winter's chill—for a moment he even saw his former employee's face blur into the terrifying features of Mr. Jingo, his childhood nightmare. This must be his work. Not content with stealing my network, that street thug, that petty murderer, has attacked my home, using my own operating system. But what could he possibly think he can accomplish, even if the entire island is deserted? Doesn't he know I have several different sources of available power—that I have enough resources available to survive in my tank for months if necessary?

  The more he thought about it the more puzzling it was. For the moment all thought of triggering the Apep Sequence was pushed aside by the mystery before him.

  Jolted by a sudden fear, he made a quick surveillance of the hangar-sized room that contained the Grail machinery, checking to make sure all was still functioning properly. On the cameras he could see that the huge space was empty of technicians, the banks of processors and switchers untended but still doing what they should.

  So what is John Dread up to? Is he just testing my defenses? Or is it something less rational—he always had a childish mind. Perhaps this is some million-credit equivalent of a prank call to his old employer. Perhaps he doesn't even know whether I'm dead or still online.

  Feeling much better, certain now that there was no true immediate danger within the building, Jongleur went back to the preparations for the Apep Sequence, but an anomaly in the program's readings brought him up short. It seemed an obvious fallacy. Somehow, he decided, in the riot of false information throughout the island, of alarms and alerts, even the crucial Grail network data had been corrupted. According to what was before him, the Apep program had already been triggered, which could not be right. The time recorded for the event was clos
e to two hours ago. But he himself had only just begun initialization a few minutes earlier.

  It must be an error, he thought. It must. The most obvious evidence was that the trajectories were completely nonsensical. Then a flicker on one of his surveillance screens took his attention away from even as important a matter as the fate of his rogue operating system.

  Someone was moving. Someone was still in the building.

  As he enlarged the picture, pushing the other camera views into the background, he saw the camera designation. A burst of terror went through him. The intruder was here—on the same floor as his own tank! For a hallucinatory moment he could feel himself plunged back into childhood—the smell of the airing cupboard, the starched towels and sheets pressed all around him, stifling him as he hid from Halsall and the other older boys. He could almost hear them.

  "Jingle? Jingle-Jangle? Come out, Frenchie. We're going to debag you, you little sod."

  With a little noiseless whimper he pushed the memory away. How? How could anyone get into my sanctuary?

  The desperate hope that it was some brave technician who had elected to remain behind shattered into cold fragments as he studied the view-window. The intruder was a woman, a middle-aged woman with short hair. He had never seen her before. More astonishing still, she was wearing one of his own company's custodial uniforms.

  A cleaning woman? On this floor? On my floor? It was so ridiculous that if he had not been gripped by fear at the invasion of his privacy, full of confusion and suspicion about all that was going on outside, he might have laughed. But at the moment he did not feel at all like laughing. He stared at her face, trying to see something in it that would tell him who she was, what she wanted. She was walking slowly and looking all around, clearly uneasy and surprised, exactly as someone would be who had stumbled into the room by accident. She showed no sign of an agenda, none of the intensity of a saboteur or assassin. Jongleur breathed a little more easily but he was still frightened. How could he get her out? There were no employees available—not even his security guards. He felt rage bubbling up.

  She will hear me, he decided, and she will hear me loud. Like the bellow of an angry God. That will set her running. But before he let his voice thunder through the audio system he pulled up the room's security records, wanting to know how she had gotten in.

  It was a simple blanket priority approval, the same thing his approved team of technicians used as they moved between floors. Olga Chotilo, Custodial Worker, it read. Something about the name seemed slightly familiar. More surprisingly, there was a code listed on her security trail that he did not at first recognize. Where had she just been? A long moment passed as he tried to remember—he had not seen that code for some time.

  Upstairs, he thought, and his thoughts spasmed like dying things. She's been on the locked floor . . . the death-place . . . how could she have gotten in . . . who helped her. . . ? And at that moment he remembered why he knew the name.

  Felix Jongleur's respiration grew dizzyingly shallow. His pulse wavered, then spiked. Again the calming chemicals began to pump, a river of heart's-ease flowing into his ancient body through plastic tubes, but it was not enough to stifle the sudden, overwhelming terror, not anywhere near enough.

  The floor was as large as those beneath and above, but strangely empty. Here there was neither the cold magnificence of a thousand banked machines or the surreal tangle of an indoor forest. At the center of the huge, dark room stood only an arc of machinery, bulking high in a pool of light like a druidic ruin. In the center of the array, in a circle of marble tiles, four black pods lay in a triangular arrangement, one almost five meters square at the center, one about the same size just above it, and two smaller pods set a bit farther out.

  Not a triangle, she decided. A pyramid.

  Coffins, she thought then. They look like coffins for dead kings.

  She moved forward, her feet silent on the sable carpet. The rest of the room lights came up slowly, so that although the spotlight was still strongest on the arrangement of machines and plastic sarcophagi, she could now see the distant walls; windowless, they were covered in something as dark and unreflective as the carpeting, so that even with brighter lighting the machinery at the room's center seemed to float in starless space.

  Good God, she thought. It is like a funeral parlor. She half-expected to hear quiet organ music, but the room was silent. Even the automated warning voices did not trespass here in the tower's upper reaches.

  When she reached the center of the room she stood for long seconds staring at the silent black objects, trying to overcome a tingle of superstitious fear. The middle pod was so big that its top loomed above her head, the second large pod a bit lower, the other two positively squat by comparison. She stared at the nearest, which lay to the right of the middle pod, but the plastic was opaque and seemed to join the floor smoothly. Plastic pipes that she guessed held cabling of some kind came out of ducts along the pod's side and burrowed into the black carpet like roots.

  She passed it by and paused by the pod that topped the horizontal pyramid, the second-largest. She took a breath and reached out to it. When her fingers touched the smooth, cool plastic, a red light blinked on along the side; she jumped back, startled and afraid, but nothing else moved. Little glowing letters appeared beside the red light.

  She leaned close, but carefully, not wanting to touch the thing again.

  Project: Ushabti

  Contents: Blastocyst 1.0, 2.0, 2.1; Horus 1.0

  Warning: Cryogenic Seal—Do not Open

  or Service Without Authorization

  She stared, trying to remember what a blastocyst was. A cell of some kind—cancerous? No, something to do with pregnancy. As far as what a horus might be, she had no idea—probably another kind of cell. Olga could not even begin to guess why someone would want to keep cellular tissue in a huge tank like this.

  Are these all the same? she wondered. Some kind of freezers for medical experiments? Are they doing some kind of genetic engineering here?

  She touched one of the smaller pods. Another red light blinked on, but the characters beside it only read; Mudd, J. L. and a string of numbers. The other small sarcophagus yielded Finney, D.S.D. and more numerals. It took her long moments to work up the courage to touch the largest pod, but when she flicked it lightly with her finger, nothing happened. She waited until her hand was trembling a little less, then touched it and held the contact.

  "Ms. Pirofsky?"

  She squealed and jumped back. The voice was right in her head.

  "I'm sorry—I didn't mean to frighten you. It's me. Sellars." His voice was rough, as though he were in great pain, but it sounded like him. Olga took a stagger-step, then sat down on the carpet.

  "I thought you were in a coma. You did frighten me. It is like the mummy's tomb in here. I almost jumped out of my skin."

  "I really am sorry. But I must speak to you and I'm afraid it can't wait."

  "What is this place? What are these things?"

  Sellars waited a moment before answering. "The largest of those devices is the true home of Felix Jongleur. The man who owns J Corporation, the man who built the Grail network."

  "Home. . . ?"

  "His body is nearly dead, and has been for years. There are many, many machines connected to that life-support pod—it extends down nearly ten meters into the floor of the room."

  "He's . . . right there. . . ?" She looked at the pod, amazed and disturbed. "He can't leave it?"

  "No, he can't leave it." Sellars cleared his throat. "I have to talk to you Ms. Pirofsky."

  "Olga, please. Yes, I know I have to get out of here. But I haven't found anything yet—anything about the voices. . . ."

  "I have."

  It took a moment to sink in. "You have? What?"

  "This is difficult, Ms. . . . Olga. Please, prepare yourself, I am afraid that it will be . . . shocking to you."

  It was hard to think of anything stranger than what she had already experienced.
"Just tell me."

  "You had a baby."

  This was the last thing she had expected to hear. "Yes. He died. He was born dead." It was quite amazing how the pain could still come so quickly, so powerfully. "I never saw him."

  Sellars hesitated again. When he spoke, it was almost in a rush. "You never saw him because he didn't die. He didn't die, Olga. They lied to you."

  "What?" There were no tears, only a dull anger. How could anyone say such a cruel, ridiculous thing? "What are you talking about?"

  "Your child was a rare mutation—a telepath. He was . . . is . . . a child that would never have lived under normal circumstances. The raw power of his mind was so great that despite many preparations, a doctor in the delivery room actually died of a stroke while performing the cesarean. Two nurses had seizures, too, but there were several on hand and one of them managed to deliver a huge dose of sedative to the child."

  "This is craziness! How could such a thing happen and I would not know about it?"

  "You were already sedated—you had been told it would be a very difficult birth, a breech, do you remember? That's because there had already been evidence that the child was abnormal. Don't you remember all the tests? Surely you must have thought there was something unusual about it. The doctors and nurses were all specialists. Highly-paid specialists."

  Olga wanted to curl up and put her fingers in her ears. Her baby was dead. For over thirty years she had struggled with it, learned to live with it. "I don't understand anything you are saying."

  "The man in that pod—Felix Jongleur. He had been looking for a child with just the potential of your baby. He and his associates had connections in dozens of hospitals all over Europe, owned many of them outright. You did not choose that hospital yourself, did you?"

  "We . . . we were referred. By a doctor—but he was a kind man!"

  "Perhaps. Perhaps he didn't understand what he was doing. But the fact is, you and your baby were delivered into the hands of people who only wanted your child—your son. After testing gave some idea of what they had found, Jongleur's specialists had already begun sedating him in the womb. They were as ready for his arrival as they could be, but even so, he nearly died from the trauma of birth—too much mental energy, a kind of hyperactivity that would have killed him in minutes. At least one person present at the birth did die. But as I said, they were largely ready. He was put into a cryogenic unit and his temperature lowered drastically. They put him into something like suspended animation."